


Lights Below the Water

by ChancellorGriffin



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Blow Jobs, City of Light (The 100), Cunnilingus, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fucking, Mind Sex, Oral Sex, Porn, Porn with Feelings, Sex Toys, Shameless Smut, Smut, Ultra Hardcore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-10
Updated: 2016-08-29
Packaged: 2018-07-13 02:44:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 32,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7135331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Liberty? Why, it doesn't exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages."<br/>--Aldous Huxley</p><p>Abby's resistance inside the City of Light is causing repeated system failures, until ALIE and Thelonious finally figure out the one way to keep her docile and content.  </p><p>(Otherwise known as the one where I decided to try and write the dirtiest, filthiest, most explicit hardcore porn I could possibly come up with, and then feelings and ALIE headcanons and fixing the finale got involved, and now here we are.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Abby Griffin is becoming a problem.

ALIE has run 124,379 simulations to map all the potential human neurological responses upon taking the key to the City of Light.  Her simulations, however, did not factor in the variable which Thelonious has added to her programming: _coercion._   The rejection of the need for consent. 

Everyone else in the City of Light is there because they chose to be, but Abby Griffin continues to resist.

ALIE manages to adapt as needed to manage Abby’s repeated interference, but it takes a disproportionate toll.  Initially, it proved useful to isolate her; she grows more restless, more difficult to appease when in the company of people with links to the world outside, so ALIE separates her from Raven and Jackson.  Their presence seems to unsettle her, to stir up ghosts.  The consent override has made her more difficult to manage than anyone else.  ALIE has had no trouble maintaining anyone else's neurosensory blockers.  No one else has required an additional system reset to re-quarantine their memories.

By the end of the first week, Abby has required a system reset thirty-six times. 

* * *

“We require her knowledge,” ALIE says to Thelonious as they watch Abby – placid and cheerful since her last system reset this morning – among the crowds strolling along the harbor outside the Citadel.  A light breeze lifts her hair out and away from her crisp red wool coat as she sips a vanilla latte (a new pleasure she’s just discovered) and looks out at the sparkling water.  “Abby Griffin is important, Thelonious.  We can’t lose her.”

Raven Reyes has severed her connection, an unprecedented shock to ALIE’s system which sent reverberations through the entire program for days.  The only other person who has tried to escape the City of Light has been successful, which means they're watching Abby closely to see if the system instability will filter through to her.

“She’s stubborn,” he says.  “Always has been.  I’ve known her since she was ten years old.”

“She is unmanageable,” says ALIE.  “The drain on my system resources to manually reset her multiple times per day will be unsustainable once the Migration is complete.”

“She doesn’t want to be here,” Thelonious observes.  “And there’s still a piece of her mind that knows that.”

They watch Abby stop short, suddenly, looking down at the cup in her hand as though she’s never seen it before.  Then she looks out at the water.

Then – just like always – they see her brow furrow as if in extraordinary concentration, and her fingertips slowly, slowly raise to her lips.  The gesture is the same each time.  She runs her forefinger along her bottom lip, over and over, but hesitantly, as though she doesn’t quite know _why._

But ALIE and Thelonious know why.  They have full administrative access to the data bank marked “GRIFFIN, ABIGAIL” in the Citadel’s central archives, which means they know about the way Abby’s heart nearly shattered with panic when Marcus offered to stay behind on the Ark while Abby went to Earth without him, and they know about the way her body ached for days after straining every muscle to pry fallen rubble off his leg, and the way he looked at her as that drill pierced her bone, and the way she cradled his face in hers and pressed her lips against his cheek to ease his worry over Octavia Blake, and the desperate, crushing heartbreak outside the prison cell where he pulled away from her kiss and walked out the door to his own execution.  And most of all, they know about the way he turned to her, sudden and unexpected, on his way out through the walls of Arkadia to freedom, and realized she wasn’t coming, and seized her face in his hands for a startling kiss which Abby was unable to stop thinking about until the moment she put the key to the City of Light in her mouth.

They know everything.

They know things even Abby doesn’t know.

The word for it – for the reason why she can still feel that kiss on her mouth even though she doesn’t remember – lives too deeply buried inside her subconscious for her to have named it yet.

But ALIE has.

“She is in love with Marcus Kane,” she notes matter-of-factly to Thelonious, who nods, no expression on his face.  Dimly, distantly, he feels that there is perhaps a part of him that once would have been surprised by this, but he feels nothing particular about it now.  Now it is simply one more line of code in Abby Griffin’s system, and this line of code has a glitch. “She would be more docile if Marcus Kane were here,” ALIE continues, with a tilt of her head.  “She would not wish to be elsewhere.  She would not be distracted.”

“Marcus has many uses,” agrees Thelonious.  “His mind is strong.  Clarke and the others trust him, which makes him a valuable asset.  And his presence will help keep Abby docile.”  He turns to ALIE.  “You must adapt your programming,” he says, which she greets with that birdlike head tilt that signifies surprise or perplexity.  “Once he is safely inside the City of Light, we must ensure that neither of them ever wants to leave it again, or ever thinks about the outside world.  Use Marcus to keep Abby distracted from thoughts of Clarke.”

“Adapt my programming?” she repeats, blinking at him, and he nods.

“Placid contentment will not be enough for Abby Griffin,” he says.  “Leave the memory blocks intact, but adjust sensory and emotional filters to 50% for both of them.  Not 90%, like the others.”

“50% is not advisable,” she says.  “That will permit more intense physical and emotional sensations than my core programming recommends.”

“You wanted her docile,” says Thelonious firmly.  “This is the only way.”

Down by the water, Abby presses her fingertip against her bottom lip, running it softly back and forth, over and over again.  And then it happens.

The entire city blinks out.  A void.  Darkness, entire and complete.

It only lasts for a moment before everything returns to normal, but around them ALIE and Thelonious see the other inhabitants of the city stop, staring around, puzzled, brows furrowed, trying to figure out what has just happened.  People begin to congregate in small clusters – _“what was that, did you just feel that”_ – but Thelonious is watching Abby, who has slowly turned towards him with a look of such cold, dark fury in her eyes that anyone capable - unlike him - of feeling fear would have been terrified.

“Griffin, Abigail Anne Walters.  Resident #251.  Commencing system reset,” says ALIE as Abby, her memories forcing their way through ALIE’s synaptic blockers, storms across the plaza toward them.  “System reset in five, four, three, two, one.”

By the time Abby reaches them she’s smiling.

“Thelonious,” she says happily and kisses him on the cheek.  “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”

“We are pleased to see you so content, Abby,” says ALIE to her pleasantly.  “Is there anything you lack to make your life here more comfortable?”

“Nothing at all,” says Abby sincerely, and means it.

“System reset complete,” says ALIE as Abby walks away.

* * *

 

It takes longer than planned, but Marcus takes the chip in the end.

Thelonious dismisses Abby after Marcus is hung on the cross; while he stands in the Polis square with a gun to the head of her unconscious corporeal body, she is walking through the front door of a spectacular penthouse apartment with ALIE beside her, staring in wonderment at the floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of the sky and the city and the glittering blue sea.

“We want you and Marcus to have everything you could possibly desire,” says ALIE, as Abby gazes around her in wonderment.  “Anything you ask can be yours if you request it.” 

"This is all for us?" Abby asks, eyes wide.

"We just want you to be happy," says ALIE.  "This is your home now."

She shows Abby the kitchen, stocked with delicacies from caviar to chocolate to fresh peaches, with a whole separate pantry just for wine.  (Nobody needs to eat in the City of Light, of course, but ALIE has left no sensory pleasure unturned in the home she has created for Marcus and Abby.  Her data indicates that fine food and wine are stimulatory pleasures which increase overall rates of contentment, and often feature prominently in the romantic or courtship process, so she has not neglected them here.)  Next, she points Abby towards the luxurious glass-and-marble bathroom, its massive sunken tub already full and steaming hot, jets bubbling away merrily.  All of this is merely lines of code for ALIE, so the tub is hot and full and ready all the time, filled with the warm rich scent of rose petals. (To refine the individual experience of each resident, ALIE analyzes their daily reactions to sensory stimuli, filtering for scent, flavor, auditory and visual preferences.  Abby likes sunlight, open spaces, fresh fruit, and the smell of roses.  Insufficient data exists at the moment to adjust filters around Marcus Kane’s specifications, but Thelonious assures her that if Abby is happy, he will be too.)

The master bedroom - which ALIE has custom-tailored to the specific objective for which they have brought Marcus Kane into the City of Light - is next on the tour, and it does not disappoint.  Abby Griffin must stop resisting ALIE, which means Abby Griffin must find a reason to want to stay inside this apartment which blocks out any desire she might have to leave it.  And ALIE’s research on this point has been thorough.  The entire wall behind the bed is upholstered in a buttery-soft gold leather, soft to the touch and well-padded.  The mattress is impossibly soft, the bed heaped with pillows, and a wall of windows let in the bright morning sun over the water by day, and the dazzling lights of the city by night.  The room is high enough, and remote enough, that even with the curtains pulled back the room ensures complete privacy.  At the foot of the bed is a white trunk, whose contents ALIE trusts will assist in Abby's distractions if needed.  There is no desk in the bedroom, no bookshelf, nothing to declare the space as belonging to any activities besides those that take place in a bed.

Abby slides open the glass balcony door to step outside, where a table and chairs await tomorrow's breakfast in the sunshine, and breathes in the crisp clean air.  "It's perfect," she says to ALIE, pleased.  "When will he be here?”

“Soon,” says ALIE.  “If you would like to make yourself ready.”  She nods towards the boudoir off the master bedroom, a rococo red-and-gold hued room full of low velvet benches, gilt mirrors and rack upon rack of elegant gowns.  Abby gives the room an appraising glance, but she isn’t happy.  ALIE tries something else.  Instantly the code rewrites itself and Abby is standing inside a clean, airy white room with crisp white closet doors and drawers, one round white velvet bench, and a mirrored glass vanity.  Abby nods.  This is better.

“This wardrobe should be sufficient for any occasion you should require,” says ALIE, “but I believe for tonight’s purposes you will require one of these.” 

She opens a closet door to reveal a hanging rack laden with a dizzying selection of lingerie.  Silk, lace, feathers, frills, even leather.  Black, white, pink, red, chocolate brown, midnight blue.  Plunging push-up bras, panties no more than tiny scraps of fabric, sinuous floor-length vintage nightdresses right out of an old film, satin flowered kimonos, wispy chiffon negligees and peignoirs.  Abby is entranced.  She has never worn anything like this against her skin before, and ALIE has already reduced the level of her sensory stimuli blockers which means the whispery feeling of satin against her skin makes her shiver.

“Make yourself ready,” ALIE tells her.  “He will be home soon.”

Abby stands in front of the closet, running her hands sensuously and decadently over the rainbow of silks and satins, before making her selection.  She undresses and puts it on, then sits down at the low vanity to brush out her hair, over and over until it shines.  “Would you prefer it to be night or day?” asks ALIE, and Abby considers.

“Night,” she finally decides, and ALIE nods, and suddenly the sky is a deep rich navy blue streaked with plum and the lights of the city below shine like a scattering of stars and the sea outside the window is just a blacker blackness than the night sky.  The bedroom changes with nightfall as well; candles glow on every surface, turning the stark white walls soft and flickering amber.

Preparations completed, Abby climbs onto the bed, reclining back against a heap of pillows, and settles in to wait.

Then, “upload successful,” says ALIE, and disappears into space just as Marcus Kane walks through the bedroom door.

* * *

His memory filters are at full strength, so he doesn’t have any idea how he got here, the trauma of the past hours forgotten.  And here there are no marks on his hands (just as there are no scars on Abby’s sleek, perfect back) to remind him of painful memories. 

All he knows is that he’s standing in the doorway of a room filled with candles, heavy with the intoxicating scent of flowers, and Abby is here . . . but it’s an Abby he’s never seen before.

She’s wearing almost nothing; he’s never seen this much of her skin before.  She’s reclining against a heap of cushions on the bed, her hair spread out below her like a river of gold, and her skin is burnished with an amber sheen from the candles.  It looks smooth and silky and like it would feel like heaven beneath his tongue, a thought that makes him swallow hard and causes unbearable constriction against the buttons of his jeans.

“You’re here,” she says happily, “come here to me,” and she holds out her hand, but he still can’t move from the doorway, his eyes raking greedily over her nearly bared body.  The faintest gossamer wisp of black panties, a startlingly sharp contrast with the white skin of her belly and thighs.  A black satin bra edged in gold that presses her perfect breasts up and close together so that all he can think about is burying his face in them.  “Why are you still wearing all those clothes?” she pouts, a hand slipping down to pet herself prettily between the thighs, fingertips delicate and graceful on the lacy fabric which he can see is already wet.  “Come here to me.”

“Abby – “

“Don’t you feel it, Marcus?” she whispers.  “Don’t you feel it?  Something’s happening.”

(She is correct.  ALIE has switched both Marcus and Abby’s emotional filters to manual.  Shame is at 0%; sexual desire is at 120%.  ALIE will observe and adjust as needed.)

“What is this place?” he asks, still looking around, taking it all in, still standing in the doorway. 

“It’s our home,” she tells him happily.  “It’s for you and me.  Forever, Marcus.  Anything we want, forever.”  She holds out her hand in pleading invitation.  “I’m so hungry, Marcus,” she whispers.  “Please, baby, I’m begging you.  Please.  Come here.”  ALIE dials Marcus’ sex drive up to 125% and he suddenly snaps, tearing off his clothes in his haste to get to her.  His jacket and t-shirt fall to the ground as he kicks off his boots and socks, then yanks his jeans down so fast he almost trips to get out of them.  He leaves the gray cotton shorts on for now as he moves over to the bed where Abby is still holding out her hands for him.  “I’m so hungry,” she whispers again, reaching out to palm his hips and pull him close so he stands at the side of the bed, knees bumping the edge of the mattress.  Then she rises up onto her hands and knees, giving Marcus a shiver-inducing glimpse into the depths of her black-and-gold satin bra, and parts her mouth wide, resting it warmly and wetly over the thin gray fabric that is the only thing between her and the massive cock now rousing to life inside.  She breathes in deeply, mouth working open and closed, mapping the shape of it with her lips, the way it arches to the left, trapped in too-tight cotton.  She runs her mouth all along the fabric barrier, listening to him moan, feeling his hands slip up her arms to grab her shoulders and brace himself.  She likes that, she likes that he’s already off-balance.  Emboldened, she hooks her fingers into the cotton waistband and pulls down just far enough that the heavy, hungry cock springs free of its prison, its impossibly vast bulk startling up close.

Shame is at zero, which means when she breathes “Oh God, baby, I want to taste it,” he takes her hair roughly in his hands and grips her tight and growls “Good girl.”  The Abby she was in the outside world, the old Abby, would think it, and blush, and look away, and the old Marcus would feel shy and self-conscious beneath her gaze.  But this is the _real_ Abby.  The _real_ Marcus.  All of this was there already.  It was part of them, it was always inside them, but buried under mountains of other thoughts that just get in the way.  There has long been a part of Abby whose desire for Marcus is this voracious, but it’s stilled and quieted by so many other things.  Tenderness.  Grief.  Hesitation.  Old memories.  But the part of her that stares hungrily at his now-bared body – the strength of his taut muscles, the thatch of dark hair she kisses her way down from his chest to his cock, the impossibly powerful arms that tighten around her back – that part of her was there all along.  

His cock is massive, swelling up to meet her as she tugs the gray cotton down his thighs so he can step out of it and stand bared before her, just inches from her waiting mouth.  The old Abby, the complicated, fractured human Abby, liked doing this to Jake, but it took her a long time to get used to it.  They were married for nearly 20 years, they learned every inch of each other’s bodies, and it didn’t take long for every pleasure of the bedroom to become second nature.  But the first few times, it was hesitant and fumbling.  She wasn’t sure what would feel good, how much of him she could take inside her, what to do when he burst hungrily in her throat.  She would open her mouth and let Jake’s cock slide wetly out and look up at him with a question in her eyes and he would smile with dazed-eyed fondness and murmur “I can’t believe how good you feel," stroking her hair with reassurance until she felt brave enough to continue.  After which he would return the favor by tossing her down on the bed hard enough to make her giggle, then burying his face between her thighs – unsure, but enthusiastic, just like she was.

But it isn’t like that now.

This Abby has two decades of muscle memory and no inhibitions and her lust for Marcus has been amplified inside her, so everything is easy and smooth and perfect.  She lifts his cock – still half-soft, but stiffening rapidly – against his belly to draw her tongue up it with a long, slow lick.  His hands tighten in her hair and she feels his thigh muscles flex beneath her palm.

Their bodies inside the City of Light are just code, just data flying back and forth between the program and their minds, which means ALIE can make adjustments to their sensory experience as needed.  Her ultimate goal is _distraction_ , the erasure from Abby Griffin’s consciousness of the daughter Thelonious and ALIE are hunting for in the outside world.  Anything that keeps Abby’s focus from leaving this apartment will diminish her resistance, will allow ALIE to mine their memory banks uninterrupted for useful information about Clarke, and will decrease the chances that Abby’s desire to break free might lead her, or Marcus Kane, to the Citadel. 

So ALIE begins, at first, with physiological reactions which map identically with those of the real Abby Griffin and Marcus Kane.  Every detail, from the softness of Abby’s skin where Kane clutches at her shoulders for balance, to the salt-and-earth tang of him as Abby tongues the pulsing shaft of his cock over and over, is reproduced to perfection.  Abby is triggered, ALIE has noticed, by _artifice_ – by anything that reminds her too jarringly that this world is not real and she did not ask to come here.  So the merging of Marcus Kane’s consciousness with the physical self ALIE builds for him matters a great deal.  If something rings false, if he smells wrong or his skin is too pale, Abby will know. 

Still, ALIE makes a handful of modifications in aid of her ultimate goal. Marcus Kane views his body as something to be governed by his mind; he resists pleasure, sometimes even comfort, for a host of complicated reasons ALIE does not fully understand.  In his own corporeal body, the physical manifestations of his desire for Abby Griffin would be slowed measurably by this internal conflict.

Or, to put it another way, it would take him a lot longer than this to get hard all the way.

But ALIE has neatly sliced away those layers of inhibition.  She removes the timidity he feels, now that he’s on the other side of forty, about the way his once-lean body has softened with age; the constant awareness he carries with him about the scars on Abby’s back, the panicked fear of seeing her in pain that still haunts his dreams after Mount Weather; and the faint sense of shyness he has never been able to shake since the very first time, decades ago, he took off his clothes in front of a girl and blushed at her wide-eyed stare.  Marcus spent enough years on an overcrowded Ark station with communal public showers to know that he’s unusual, that even men with no sexual interest in other men’s cocks can never seem to stop gaping at his.  And it’s a part of who he is, it’s shaped how he stands and how he walks, it’s shaped how other men see him; but when he bares himself before a lover he’s planning to take to bed for the first time, there’s a strange combination of pride, apologetic embarrassment, and vulnerability at being stared at so openly.  Or at any rate, there _would_ be, with Abby.  With Abby, he would blush and look away and clench his fists so she wouldn’t see his hands were shaking as he closed his eyes and felt the gentle pressure of her gaze rake over his skin.  With Abby it would take him a long time to relax, to open himself up to pleasure, to become ready for her.  They would be tentative, shy, tender with each other.  They would ask permission and go slow.  Soft touches, low voices, gentle hands.

But that’s not what happens with this Marcus and this Abby, whose complicated history has been stripped away from them, leaving nothing but their rawest human desires.  This time, Abby dives in without hesitation, her tongue hot and wet and messy against his cock, humming little sighs sending vibrations through his delicate skin.  And this time, Marcus fists her hair and moves in closer and growls “ _Fuck,_ Abby, your mouth feels so good,” and he’s hard all the way through in no time without all those inconvenient emotions getting in the way.

Abby’s fingertips knead the soft flesh of his hips, and she can feel the flex and release of his thigh muscles underneath her hand as his whole body grows more tense.  The hand that’s still on his cock, pressing it upwards to rest against his stomach as she wetly laps her way up towards the head, pumps slickly up and down at the base.  “You taste so good,” she says, eyes dark and wide and gazing up at him, and a light shiver races down his spine.

“Abby,” he groans as her hand pumps faster.  But it’s an awkward angle with her on all fours and she can’t get the grip she wants, so she climbs down and makes him switch places, guiding him to sit on the edge of the mattress as she lowers herself to kneel between his thighs, kissing her way back up them, and then returns to where she left off.

Her tongue and lips roam everywhere, slicking his hot cock with moisture.  The long, gliding, hard licks make him shiver, but it’s the slow wet kisses she bestows on his achingly sensitive head that begin to make him feel weak.  He’s leaking precum already, a fact she notes with a smile as she slicks her thumb across his slit to coat the entire tip and then greedily, messily kisses it off.  He groans, his hands tangling tighter and tighter in her hair, and the wet little sounds those perfect rosy lips make as his cock disappears inside them begin to make him lightheaded.  He gives a short, sharp gasp as her teeth come into play, just for a moment, an ecstatic little zing of pain-pleasure, there and then gone.  She laughs up at him, delighted by his delight, and nuzzles at his cock a little, closing her eyes and feeling its delicious warm weight brush against her lips, cheek, jaw.  It’s too much for her to take all the way inside, but she can try.

Her mouth opens, soft and hot and wet, breathing damply all over his skin, and then he’s inside, and ALIE helpfully adjusts Abby’s gag reflex down by half to make things easier.  Marcus slides in deep, his hands coming down from her hair to cup her cheeks and feel them fill and hollow as she breathes around him.  He glides slow and sure over the silky-rough surface of her tongue, and Abby’s body begins to tremble, lips closing firmly around him to give him a hard suck that startles the breath out of his lungs.  She sighs a long, sweet, slow “Mmmmmmm” as her mouth moves urgently around him for a few moments, then relaxes again to turn her head and angle herself to take him in a little further. 

The tip of his cock bumps into the back of her throat, but she doesn’t choke, just smiles and pumps harder at the iron-hard base pulsing with life beneath her hands.  When she tilts her head again, smiling up again, he slides a little further down her throat, and then a little further.  No woman has ever taken Marcus Kane this deep before.  There’s no way for her to take him all the way inside, but he doesn’t care.  The hot, hungry suction of her lips along his shaft, the wetness pooling around him inside her mouth, the vibration of her contented, humming little sighs, send him into a tailspin. 

“Abby, I’m coming,” he murmurs through broken, panting gasps, and she nods her head to let him know she’s ready.  “I’m coming, please, baby, please, _please_ . . .”

Her hands drift down lower, cup the hot, heavy mounds beneath his cock and give them a gentle press as she releases him just far enough to the front of her mouth that she can suck and swallow with ease.  He groans, trembles, grips the covers of the bed in strained white knuckles, and feels her swirl her soft little tongue over and over around the throbbing, pulsing head.  It’s wet and dirty and raw, the way it feels, the sounds she makes.  Every nerve ending is zinging with want, with the rise and rise of an explosive orgasm making its way up through his body.  She sucks loudly and wetly, her tongue almost cajoling as it prods the first burst of hot wetness out of him, and she drinks it up as he groans and groans.  “Fuck, Abby,” he whimpers.  “Oh, _fuck,_ baby.  Harder.” 

So she pumps him harder, swallows him harder, grips him harder, does everything harder, and then he’s over the edge, he can’t stop, and he explodes into her mouth with extraordinary force.  She swallows every drop easily, thirstily, and as he collapses back against the mattress, panting and trembling, she lets him slide out of her sticky wet lips with a soft pop before tending to him with long, gentle licks until he’s completely clean.

ALIE has dialed his refractory period down to only a few minutes, so he’ll be able to go again before too long, but he doesn’t know that yet.  All he knows – as he sits up on the bed, panting, trembling, and seizes the smiling woman before him in powerful arms, lifting her up and sinking down to the bed on top of her – is that it’s Abby’s turn now.

Back in the outside world, in the past Marcus now doesn't remember, he spent a very long time more or less successfully repressing his urge to throw Abby up against the wall or lay her out on the council chamber or smash down the door of her bedroom to have her as hard and rough as he can.  He never consciously thought about those things - about fucking her, about burying his face in her cunt, about her mouth feeling soft and wet around his cock.  He never permitted himself to.  It was the only way he could function, could manage to do his job.

But the piece he has never been able to suppress - the objects of desire he could never ignore - are her breasts.

He's smitten with them.

The sight of them torments him at the most inappropriate times – in council meetings, or in the mess hall, or when they’re surrounded by people.  They make him ache, and he can’t escape them.  He doesn’t remember Jake Griffin, of course, so he doesn’t remember the ring ALIE has deleted from Abby’s code, but he remembers _something_ forever drawing his gaze to that spot. Even before he knew he wanted her, before he knew what any of this was, Abby Griffin’s breasts were a troubling fixation he couldn’t escape.

And now they’re _here_ , within his reach, and she’s lying back on a mountain of silk-covered pillows in a black satin bra with a pretty little trim of gold lace and a little gold bow between her breasts, which he nips at a little bit with his teeth to make her giggle, and so he starts with the thing he's been wanting to do for as long as he can remember.

He can’t believe he finally gets to do this.  He can’t believe he has permission to touch her. 

He starts slow, drawing his tongue in a tantalizing line from the little gold bow up between the soft mounds, then up the center of her throat, his hands sliding down her shoulders to trace with light fingertips over the creamy swell of her breasts, dipping in between the black satin and white skin to brush over her nipples.  She gasps.  (ALIE has control over Abby’s erogenous zones as well, and has increased nerve ending sensitivity by 12% to begin with.  Every sensation on her skin is heightened.)  He doesn’t kiss her right away, but runs his tongue along the seam of her perfect pink lips until they fall open beneath him and a low sighing gasp tumbles out.  Then he kisses her, for the first time (he doesn’t remember the other one, either), and they both begin to dissolve.

Abby’s increased sensitivity means the soft scritch of Marcus’ beard against her skin makes her begin to shiver, and she doesn’t stop.  She reaches up to cup his cheeks in her hand, stroking the salt-and-pepper bristle with gentle hands as he sighs with pleasure into her mouth.  His lips are full and soft, his tongue insistent in the most delicious way, and she can’t restrain a hungry gasp as his fingertips inside her bra grow harder and firmer against her nipples.  They pant and groan into each other’s mouths, her soft little body melting beneath his, until finally he lets himself do the thing he’s been wanting all this time and kisses his way back down her throat to bury his mouth in her breasts.

 _“Oh!”_ she gasps, her voice high and breathy as he tongues the white swell of luminous, translucent flesh that rises out of the black satin.  He’s hungry and he’s craved this for so long and her skin tastes like Abby and he’s in heaven, all shame and hesitation gone, so he’s holding nothing back from her.  There’s a spot, just above the place where her breasts meet, that he can’t stop kissing.  He’s drawn to it, like a magnet, though he can’t remember why.  And it does something to Abby, when he presses his mouth against it, so he returns there again and again.  But there’s so much to explore, too much to stay in one place, and finally the desire to take her into his mouth grows too potent to ignore, so he reaches beneath her body to gently unclasp the black bra and open his lips to taste her.

Beard against nipple, something Abby’s never felt in her life.  It’s heaven.  "Oh God, Marcus," she whimpers, gripping his hair with one hand, palming his bare back with the other, holding him close, thrashing and gasping as her tender flesh feels the rush and whisper of Marcus over and over again.  He takes her nipple between his teeth, gives it a light tug, and if shame existed inside the City of Light Abby would be blushing wildly at the ocean of wetness pouring out of her.  Her black lace panties are already soaked, and she feels sticky warmth pooling on the flesh of her thighs.  Marcus sucks wetly at one aching, pebbled nipple, rolling the other between thumb and forefinger, and Abby is very close to coming just from this. 

He switches to the other breast for awhile, nuzzling into her, letting her feel his beard everywhere, chuckling at her stunned, desperate gasps.  This time when he bites down lightly, she whimpers a broken “please, Marcus, please," imploring him for some kind of relief.

“Please what?” he teases her, lifting his head from her breasts as she clutches wildly at him, pulling him up to her and seizing his mouth in a desperate, hard, gasping kiss.

“Please make me come,” she begs, “Marcus, I’m dying, _please,_ I can’t – I need to – “

He doesn’t let her finish, crashes his mouth against hers again, but a heartbeat later she cries out in astonished pleasure as his fingers stroke their way lightly through her hot, slippery folds.

“Like this?” he murmurs, but she shakes her head wildly.

“I want your mouth,” she whispers.  “Your mouth feels so good, baby, I want it.  I need it.  Please.  _Please.”_

He chuckles, his fingertip probing lightly at her clit, making her sigh, hips lifting off the bed to thrust into his body.  “Yeah?” he asks playfully.  “Beard feels good, huh?”  He nuzzles back in between her breasts and she cries out.

“So good,” she gasps wildly.  “So good, baby.  I didn’t know . . . I didn’t know – “

“You made me feel so good,” he whispers to her, lips brushing lightly against hers.  “You made me come so hard, baby.  I want to make you feel good too.”  He kisses her, soft and sweet but with a promise of something dirty and dangerous and raw inside it.  “I want to make you scream,” he whispers against her ear. “If I kiss your cunt, baby, will you scream for me?”

“You know I will,” she whispers, chest rising and falling as he smiles and kisses his way down her chest.

The soft shivery scratch of beard down her silky skin makes her gasp, cheeks hot with pleasure, as his tongue trails down the soft slope of her belly.  He nips lightly with his teeth at the ribbon of black silk resting over her hipbones, hooks his fingers into the waistband, and tugs her soaked panties down her thighs to lay her bare before him. 

Her cunt is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, shell-pink and glistening with wetness, crowned in soft amber-gold hair.  He rests his head along the sharp jut of her pubic bone and inhales deeply, breathing in her scent, as his hands slide up the insides of her taut strong thighs to press them open.  “Marcus,” she whispers, caressing his thick soft locks, curling them around her fingertips, stroking his scalp, and gently but firmly guiding him lower.  He chuckles a little at her impatience, but he obeys, hands drifting down from her hipbones towards her hot center.  She gasps, a high sharp _“oh, oh, oh"_ of pleasure, as his deft fingers part the lush rosy folds of her labia and suddenly there she is, open before him, flushed and pink and perfect, and he’s so hungry to taste her that her scent is making him dizzy.

He kisses his way inward with torturous slowness, suckling lightly on her inner folds and running his tongue along them to savor the tart-sweet taste of her.  She whispers his name again, aching, impatient, and he teases her by darting his tongue out sharply to nudge at her clit.  “Yes,” she begs him.  _This_ is what she wants.  _This_ is where she wants him.  He bends in closer, letting his lips brush lightly over it, just a whisper of touch, but it’s enough – because his mouth on her clit means his beard is inside her now too.

“Oh _God_ ,” she gasps.  “Oh God, baby, you feel so good, I can’t – it’s too – “

But her voice trails off into a desperate whimper as his lips open and swallow up her clit, suckling it, tugging it, biting it gently, flicking it hard with his tongue, and she can’t do anything more after that except moan and tremble as he burrows in deeper.

She’s delicious, and the wetness is everywhere.  The old Marcus would have been tentative here, gentle, restrained; but this Marcus is wild and starving and he likes the warm messy sticky feeling of Abby all over him as he dives in deeper.  Abby on his lips and tongue and running down his chin.  Abby in his beard and on his cheeks and nose.  Abby filling his mouth and running warmly down his throat.  Abby everywhere, wet and hot and sweet, making him dizzy as he nuzzles further inside. 

He’s so distracted by the taste of Abby, the silken-wet feel of her as he laps hungrily with his tongue, that it doesn’t even occur to him to question how hard he is, how quickly he’s ready for her again.  His cock is at full strength again, pulsing between his thighs, ready to fuck her once he’s eaten his fill, and if the fluttering high-pitched gasps from the head of the bed and the hard little bud between his lips weren’t so distracting there might have been a part of him still able to realize that his body doesn’t ordinarily work like that. 

But he has a mouth full of Abby and there’s no room for anything else.

Her hands tighten in his hair as her hips thrust up, up, trying to capture more, which is the signal that she’s about to come.  So he redoubles his efforts, determined to make her feel as good as she made him feel, alternating long flat strokes up her center with quick little licks against her clit, and occasionally startling the breath out of her lungs by lapping at her hot, wet entrance and fucking her just a little with his tongue.

“Marcus,” she gasps, “I’m going to – baby, I’m – oh, _oh,_ Marcus, don’t stop.  Oh please, _please_ baby, don’t stop.”

He doesn’t stop.  He devours her.  Hard, hungry, frantic.  He burrows in, feeling himself disappear inside her, the scent of her so powerful now that he feels drunk off it.  When she comes, flooding his mouth with more wetness, her hands drift from his hair to his shoulders and grip him tight to brace herself.  She’s loud when it finally hits her, head thrown back against the pillows, breasts heaving with high-pitched gasping cries, and he feels every sound she makes echo shiveringly along his rock-hard cock.  Abby comes and comes, and Marcus drinks and drinks, and ALIE watches in satisfaction as the meter measuring Abby's risk of neurosensory blocker malfunction ticks down lower and lower.  She has assessed the situation correctly; this Abby, sweating and shaking on a heap of pillows while Marcus Kane licks shining trails of liquid from her thighs, is entirely docile.  Resistance is the last thing on her mind. 

Marcus strokes her back down, his hands soothing as her twitching, contracting thigh muscles begin to soften again, and his tongue laps gently at the wetness between her thighs.  She squirms and shudders a little, desperately sensitive after coming so hard, so he presses a soft parting kiss on the damp warm hair over her cunt and lifts his head.  Abby swallows hard, eyes wide and naked with lust as Marcus swipes absently along his glistening bottom lip with his fingertip, then sucks it clean.

“Come here,” Abby whispers hoarsely, clutching at his shoulders and pulling him back up towards her, seizing his mouth for a wet, messy kiss.  She holds him there for a long time, running her tongue all over his beard and cheeks and throat, lapping him clean like a kitten, before taking his face in both her hands.

“Why haven’t we ever done this before?” she murmurs, hands caressing his cheeks and jaw, and he can’t answer her because he doesn’t know either, but he does find his mouth drawn back to that one place, the one he can’t stop thinking about, the place just above the space between her breasts.  He kisses it over and over, questingly, as though expecting to find something there that answers the question about why, after all these months and even years, they’ve never allowed themselves to feel this good.

ALIE deems it advisable to abort this line of inquiry, so she makes some more adjustments, dialing Abby’s sexual desire up another 10% and increasing the tactile sensitivity inside her vaginal walls by 20%.  It kicks in immediately, with Abby sliding her hands down to press flat and insistent against his back, holding him close, as she whispers “Marcus.  I need you inside me.  I need you, please.”

“Say it,” he growls with playful roughness, seizing her in strong arms and flipping her over until her body rests on top of his.  “I want you to say it.”

“Fuck me,” she breathes against his skin, her hair trailing down in a silken curtain that brushes against his chest and makes him shiver.  “I need your cock inside me.”

He wraps his arms around her and sits up, holding her tight against his chest, and adjusts them carefully until he’s seated with his back braced against the plush upholstered wall, Abby comfortably straddling his lap with her legs tucked around him.

“I want you this way,” he murmurs, brushing his lips over hers and up her neck to drop a line of shiver-inducing kisses below her ear.  “I want to look at you when you come.”

“Yes, baby.”

“I want to make you feel good.”

“Oh God,” sighs Abby as he kisses her neck.  “You will.  You will.  I need that cock.”

“Are you ready?” he asks her, and she nods.  And then, in one smooth, fluid movement, she grasps his now rock-hard cock in her hands, and lowers herself on top of it.

The effect is electric.

Abby is drenched, and no discomfort exists in the City of Light, which means Marcus bottoms out inside her immediately, stretching her open so deep and hard that her gasp is nearly a scream.  He's massive, he fills her up entirely, and for a long moment she just sinks forward against his chest, gasping, face buried in his neck, hands clutching desperately at his back, feeling the head of his cock so deep inside her that she feels turned inside out.  "Oh God, baby, I can't believe how good you feel," he groans into her hair, kissing the top of her head over and over, holding her close. 

"Marcus," she whimpers, shattered by pleasure.  "Marcus.  Oh, God."

"Can I," he starts to say, and she nods frantically, pulling back and clutching at his shoulders so she can look at him as he very gently, very slowly gives his hips a slow, shallow thrust.  Abby cries out again, feeling the tip of his cock press hard against her G-spot, and wriggles her hips on his to feel it again.  Marcus hisses a long indrawn breath through his teeth at the sensation, and Abby takes his face in her hands. 

"Do you like it when I move that way?" she asks him, and he nods.  "Want me to do it some more?"

"Fuck, yes," he growls, so she clutches his shoulders for balance and begins to roll her hips slowly, back and forth, side to side, gasping in dizzying pleasure as the massive cock buried inside her shifts position and presses her open further and further.  "Fuck me, Abby," he begs her, and so with a deep breath she braces herself, lifts herself halfway off his cock, and plunges back down.

They both cry out in choked, stunned gasps of pleasure, and then they can't stop.

Abby braces her palms on the padded leather wall behind his back and rides him hard.  Sweat trickles down through her loose tangled hair and along the ridges of her spine, and sheens his hard bare chest as their bodies crash together over and over and over.  It's rough and hard and wild and the moans are nearly screams.  Marcus clutches the soft perfect mounds of Abby's ass in his powerful hands, pressing her down as he slams upwards into her.  Abby braces her knees on the mattress for leverage to plunge up and down over and over, feeling the vast straining bulk of him glide with agonizingly slick friction against her hypersensitive inner walls.  "Marcus," she moans, head thrown back as he sucks hungrily at her nipples.  "Oh God, Marcus, your cock feels so good.  Baby, you're so good."

"Are you gonna come, baby girl?" he whispers, licking a rivulet of sweat from between her breasts, and she nods desperately.

"I'm so close," she whimpers, "will you touch me?"

"You want me to rub your little clit, is that it?" he murmurs in a low harsh rasp as his hips buck against her, and she nods, gasping with delight as he obeys her and slides one hand between their bodies to stroke hard, fast circles on her soaked clit.

"Oh," she pants, "yes, baby, yes, right there."

"Is that good?"

"It's perfect, don't stop."

"I'm so close," he groans into her skin, "Abby, can I come inside you?"

"Oh God, baby, yes," she gasps back, and seizes his face in her hands.  "Let me watch you.  Please.  Let me see you come, baby."  Her hips pick up speed, fucking him harder and deeper, and his hand on her clit rubs faster and faster, and because ALIE has adjusted their specifications perfectly, they come at the same time, forehead leaning against forehead, her sharp high-pitched cries weaving in harmony with his grunting, growling low ones, and then they burst together and shudder to a halt.

He wraps his arms around her, holding her close, tasting the sweat on her soft skin as they gasp and tremble and sink back to earth together.  She lifts up her hips to pull his softening cock out of her with a quiet, wet little pop, and caresses it lightly back into slumber.  He buries his face in her neck, shoulder, collarbone, before drifting back to the spot over her breasts, and resting his head there as his breathing stills.  Abby holds him, tight and close, her hands running through his hair as she cradles him to her breast.  His lips rest lightly on that place he can’t stop thinking about, and suddenly something happens.  A memory darts through his consciousness – just a flash, there and then gone, lightning-fast – but long enough for him to realize there’s something there.  It’s infuriatingly insubstantial, blinking into view, then gone.  He feels like he’s staring into a dark black ocean and sees the ghost of long-distant light flickering someplace below the water.

There’s something down there, something buried, something that sends a shiver - not of pleasure but of fear - down his spine, and it’s linked to this soft white skin he can’t stop kissing.

“Did you used to have a necklace or something?” he asks her suddenly, tilting his head up to hers, and she furrows her brow in thought.

“I don’t think so,” she says doubtfully.  “I’ve never really been a flashy jewelry girl.”

And that’s definitely true, he remembers that, so she must be right.  But he traces his finger over that hollow anyway, over and over, staring down into the black depths of the sea and watching for the distant light.

Then he realizes his fingers are tracing the shape of a circle, over and over and over again, and there it is, the light below the surface, close enough now to make out the shape of it, and _he knows._  


“It was a ring,” he says urgently, gripping her shoulders in his strong hands, but she stares at him blankly.  “Abby, it was Jake’s ring.”  It’s a lighthouse now, the circle over her breasts, it’s lighting up the whole sky, for one brief moment he can see everything.  “We’re not supposed to be here,” he tells her, and watches her eyes wide.  “Abby, we have to get home, we have to get to Clarke – “

_“Clarke,”_ whispers Abby, and her daughter’s name in her mouth is a lighthouse too, and there it all is again.  They stare at each other in panic.

“We have to get out of here, Abby, we have to go back,” says Marcus, and she nods.

“The building where ALIE lives,” she says urgently, “it’s called the Citadel.  If we can get inside –“

“Griffin, Abigail Anne Walters.  Resident #251,” says ALIE, seated elegantly with her legs crossed in the armchair beside the bed.  “Kane, Marcus Hector.  Resident #1863.  Commencing dual system reset in five, four, three, two, one.”

And that's that.  


She watches their bodies relax back into each other.   Marcus lowers Abby down to the mattress and sinks down beside her, feeling her wrap her arms around his back and curl up tight against him.  (They don’t _need_ sleep, inside the City of Light, but ALIE’s files show that they both tend to find the sensation of heavy post-coital slumber extremely pleasurable.)

“Were you just saying something?” Marcus asks suddenly.

“When?”

“Just now. A minute ago.”

“No.”

“Huh,” he says, brow furrowed. 

“You must be hearing things,” she laughs at him, and he grins back.

“Must be.”

“Besides,” she adds, taking his face in her hands and kissing him over and over, “there’s a lot more interesting things I’d rather do with my mouth right now than talking.”


	2. Chapter 2

Raven’s been up for nineteen hours straight but doesn’t feel it. 

Monty and Harper’s job is to keep her fed and supplied with coffee (which Harper is now forcing her to alternate with water “so you don’t have a caffeine heart attack and kill us all”), and check in occasionally on Jasper, who they’ve locked in the brig.  But they can’t see what Raven can see, they can’t walk through the City of Light with her, so they’re mostly there to keep her company and make sure she stays tethered to the real world.  Monty’s not sure how comfortable he feels with the dazed-eyed look on her face as she stares at that bank of computer screens, scrolling through infinite code.  There’s a little too much ALIE still left inside her, he thinks sometimes; she’s still herself, she’s their Raven again, but this super-powered genius brain that leaves everyone else in the dust makes him ever so slightly apprehensive.

When Harper tries to ask her – mostly, Monty thinks, to make conversation and force Raven to interact with a human instead of a screen for five minutes – what she’s working on, Raven explains that the killswitch inside the Citadel is guarded by a firewall she can’t breach without alerting ALIE to her presence.  But she has a theory – a risky one – that the firewall might not block someone trying to enter the Citadel from _inside._   Monty rejected the idea outright at first, thinking she intended to take the chip herself, and only came around once she reassured him that all she was doing was scanning the other minds inside the City of Light for vulnerabilities and weaknesses.  She’s hunting for an ally, for someone who might be willing to listen, someone who might be able to get inside the Citadel without raising ALIE’s suspicions. 

She began with the newest recruits and is working backwards, reasoning that ALIE’s hold on them might be weaker, that there might be a vulnerability inside their code she’s missed.  She stands invisible on a crowded street corner, like a ghost, watching Grounders and Sky People alike stroll past her, chatting amicably in 21st-century clothing.  She staked out this spot when she began her surveillance two days ago, because it’s the busiest intersection in the City of Light and opens out onto a harborside plaza surrounded on three sides by a majestic, glittering glass-and-steel building.

This is the Citadel.

And what Raven is trying to find out, as she scans the faces strolling along the harbor, is if any of these people actually know that.

She stands in the shadows, her back pressed against the cool glass of a lobby window (she’s standing in front of a towering apartment building that looks out over the water), and watches people come and go, watches to see if any of them look up towards that building behind the plaza, watches to see if they seem to realize there’s anything different about it.  _Look up, look up,_ she whispers to them irritably.  _Give me_ something. _Come on.  Wake up._

But nobody looks up at the Citadel.  They just keep going about their day.

She sees faces she recognizes, sometimes – Jackson likes the bakery on the corner of the plaza and comes here every morning for coffee and impossibly decadent French pastries.  And Wick brushed past her this morning, which made her heart pound in her chest with fear, but he didn’t see her.  None of them could.  Still, it’s disorienting.  But besides the Wick run-in, it’s another frustratingly tedious day.  Watching, analyzing, scanning for weaknesses, hunting for a way in the back door that will get her to the killswitch before ALIE sees she’s there.

Hours go by.  Nothing.

And then, suddenly, it happens.

“What the hell was that?” exclaims Monty as Raven snaps up with a jolt so sharp she almost spills coffee all over the keyboard.  “The whole screen went black.”

“Not just the screen,” says Raven, mind racing, looking around her at what was once a busy sunlit plaza and is now suddenly a dark empty void.  “The _city_.”

“What?”

And then, just that quickly, like the flip of a lightswitch, everything is back as it was. 

Almost.

“They felt it too,” Raven whispers, watching the milling crowds along the plaza turn to each other uncertainly, as if nobody is sure whether the thing that just happened was only to them. 

“Felt what?  What _was_ that?”

“I don’t know,” says Raven grimly, “but ALIE is panicking.  I’ve got to find out what happened.”

“It looks like she’s running a system reset on one section of code,” Monty says, clicking a few times to open up a new window to access the neural databanks. 

Raven rolls her chair over to his monitor to look over his shoulder and lets out a low exclamation of astonishment.

 _“Holy shit,”_ she whispers.  “It was right in front of us the whole time.”

“What was?” asks a curious Harper, rising from the couch to come stare over their shoulders at the meaningless wall of green numbers and letters in front of her. 

“Our way in,” says Raven, her voice pulsing with excitement.  “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.  I started with the people who’d taken the chip the most recently, but that was a mistake.  That was a waste of time.  I should have started with the people who _didn’t want to be there_.”  She points to the screen to show Monty.  “Look,” she says.  “This block of code represents Residents 250-300.  They’re numbered based on the order they entered the City of Light.  Lower numbers means on the early end.  The first 100 or so are ALIE’s Grounder scouts; right around 175 or so is when they came to Arkadia.  I was 192.”  She clicks a few times, pulls up the screen for Residents 150-200, and points to the line of code that was once her, and even Harper can see that it’s different.  The others are smoothly scrolling lines of green, but where Raven’s finger is pointing, the code is fractured, broken, full of holes and blank spaces and jagged truncated lines.  It’s a mess.  She clicks back to the first screen and points again.  “Look,” she says.  “Nobody else in this block has required a system reset on their synaptic filters.  Zero.  Not one.  Except for Resident #250, who has had ninety-seven of them.”

“Who?” asks Harper impatiently.  “Who is it?”

Raven grins.  “Guess,” she says to Harper.  “Who’s the biggest, stubbornest pain in the ass in the City of Light?”

“You.”

 _“Besides_ me.”

“Oh my God,” says Monty in a low, stunned voice, as the penny drops.  “It’s _Abby_.”

Harper, unexpectedly, bursts out laughing.  “Ninety-seven system resets,” she says.  “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

“We’re idiots,” says Monty.  “Why didn’t we start there?”

“Because we’re idiots,” Raven agrees, and sits down at the screen, clicking to pull up the real-time scrolling of code that represents Abby Griffin.  “She was coerced into taking the key – “

“How?” asks Harper, but Raven shakes her head tightly and Monty lays a gentle, reproving hand on Harper’s shoulder.  Raven does not want to talk about this.

“She was coerced, you said,” Monty repeats, guiding her back on topic.  “So does that make her relationship with ALIE different?”

“It must, though I don't know how,” says Raven, scanning through page after page of code.  “But nobody else has undergone this level of modifications and reprogramming.  Her code is totally isolated from everyone else except one other person; I don’t think she goes outside.  It’s like ALIE is custom-tailoring Abby’s entire world.”

“Where is she now?” asks Monty.  “Can you get to her?”

“Let’s find out,” says Raven, and Monty watches her fingers fly over the keyboard.  “Come on, Abby,” she whispers, more to herself than to them.  “Come on.  Where are you?  Where is she hiding you?”

“Who’s the one other person?” asks Harper.

“What?”

“You said Abby’s alone somewhere except for one other person.”

“Resident #1863,” says Raven absently.  “Recent-ish.  Since they left for Polis.  Probably a Grounder.  ALIE must have got her a butler or something.  Aha!” she interrupts herself in triumph.  “Found her.  There’s an apartment building clear on the other side of the city, as far away from the Citadel as you can get.  The whole rest of the building is empty.  ALIE’s keeping her in solitary confinement for some reason.” She clicks a few times, and just like that she’s inside the apartment.  “Very _fancy_ solitary confinement,” she corrects herself, looking around at the floor-to-ceiling windows, the sparkling ocean views, the elegant furnishings . . . and something a little more unexpected.

Her hands freeze on the keyboard.

“What’s wrong, Raven?” asks Harper.  “Did you find her?”

“Um,” Raven begins uncomfortably.  “Yes.  I found her.”

“Is she okay?”

“At the moment,” says Raven, looking away from the computer screen and staring down awkwardly at her keyboard, “I’d say she’s doing pretty well.”

“Why are you blushing?”

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Be grateful all you can see is lines of code, Harper,” Raven tells her grimly.  “Or you’d never be able to look Resident #1863 in the eye ever, ever again.  Which would be a shame, after all the effort you put into keeping him from getting executed.”

“Oh shit,” breathes Monty in horror.  “Oh, _shit._   They got _Kane_?”

“Yeah,” says Raven grimly.  “They got Kane.”

“Well, on the plus side,” Harper chimes in, “I was rooting for those two crazy kids.”

“What are you talking about?” asks Monty, but Harper ignores him. 

“He kissed her as we were leaving,” she tells Raven.  “Octavia told me.  She saw it.  She said it was really cute.”

“They’re doing a little more than that right now,” says Raven, who still can’t look up.

“Who’s doing what?” asks Monty again, and Harper giggles.

“Well, Monty,” she says, “when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much – “

The penny drops, and Monty puts his hands over his ears.  “I get it, I get it,” he snaps at her, “don’t give me any more details.  I don’t want to start picturing it.”

“You’re lucky,” says Raven.  “I’ll never be able to unsee what I can see on that screen right now.”

“Okay, but are you more turned on, or more traumatized?” asks Harper, who is unabashedly enjoying herself, and Raven has to think.

“Like 50/50,” she finally says.  “I don’t think the Lord meant us to watch people we actually know star in their own hardcore pornography.”

“I’m very uncomfortable with this conversation,” says Monty tightly.  The girls ignore him.

“Okay, but like if you didn’t know them – “

“Oh if I _didn’t_ know them?  Ten out of ten.”

“Girl, you’ve _got_ to tell us what you’re seeing.”

“Absolutely not,” says Raven, still averting her eyes, “you’d never be able to get through a medical examination without blushing again.  Be thankful you’re spared this sight.”

“You want us to give you some privacy?” teases Harper.  “We can leave you to it and come back in like an hour, if you need to – “

“Shut your face or I will shut it for you.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell Miller and Bryan I caught you watching porn at work,” she says innocently, holding the walkie-talkie behind her back so Raven can’t see that she’s pressed the on switch.

“What the hell?” exclaims Miller through the receiver.  “Who found porn and didn’t invite us?”

“It’s not porn!” Raven snaps defensively.

“Raven has secret porn,” giggles Harper.  “Kind of.  But she won’t tell us about it.”

“Some of us don’t _want_ her to,” Monty retorts.

“You really want me to give you details, Harper?”  Raven fires back.  “You _really_ want to be standing there while Kane briefs you on guard rotations and thinking about what his dick looks like?”

 _“Kane’s_ in your porn?” exclaims Miller through the walkie, suddenly interested.  “What the hell did you find, Raven?”

“He’s in the City of Light,” says Harper, “which isn’t good news – “

“I’ll say it’s not,” Monty agrees.  “He’s the best shot in Arkadia.  I don’t want to know what he’s capable of doing with that freaky robot in his brain.”

“But he is, apparently, doing the nasty with Abby Griffin right now.  And Raven can see it.”

“Awwww,” says Miller fondly.  “I was rooting for those crazy kids.”

“That’s what I said!”

“We’re coming to look at the porn,” Miller announces.

“For the last time, there’s _no_ – “

“I bet it’s good,” Miller breezes past Raven’s interruption without hearing her.  “He walks like he’s packing."

Harper nods her agreement.  “He _totally_ does.”

“I am . . . just . . . _so uncomfortable_ with this conversation,” Monty says again, to no avail, as an enthusiastic Miller bursts through the door, followed a few paces later by an exasperated, sighing Bryan.

“Where’s the porn?” 

Monty points to the bank of computer screens scrolling infinite rows of green numbers. “Right there, apparently." 

Miller’s face falls. “What the hell, Harper! You said Raven had porn!”

“She does,” says Harper.  “But only she can see it.”

“Well, what kind of fun is _that?”_   Miller says grumpily.  “Look at her.  She’s blushing.  She can’t even look at the screen.  That must mean it’s good stuff.”

“You _do_ understand the difference between porn and walking in on a private moment between two people you actually know, right?” says Bryan dryly.  “Just checking.”

“Everybody shut up for a second,” says Raven suddenly, and her voice is sharp and clear and brooks no argument, and so they do.  “Just . . . shut up,” she says again, and suddenly she’s staring up at the screen again, immersed in the scrolling numbers, her eyes getting that faraway, unfocused look she gets when she’s deep in thought. 

“What is it, Raven?” asks Monty gently, as unobtrusively as he can. 

“Something’s not right,” she says softly.  “This isn’t right.”

Harper and Miller bite back their jokes, and Bryan looks worriedly at Monty, and nobody speaks, because something in Raven’s tone of voice silences everyone in the room.  They’re afraid to even breathe too loudly.  This is how it gets right before Raven has an idea, and they know her well enough to know what she needs when she needs to think.

So they watch her, and they wait.

The others have no idea what Raven’s actually looking at right now; if they did, they’d forgive her tight-lipped, flushed embarrassment.  They’re picturing something like Raven accidentally opening a bedroom door and catching a peek of two bodies writhing beneath sheets.  They’re not seeing what Raven can see.

They’re not seeing a naked, sweat-sheened Abby on her hands and knees in the middle of the living room, coming and coming with a desperate, keening refrain of _“oh, oh, oh”_ as Marcus kneels behind her, gripping her ass in his big hands and fucking her so hard that Raven’s not sure how Abby’s still _alive_ – forgetting, for a moment, that of course this Abby is a consciousness inside lines of code.  “There is no pain inside the City of Light,” Raven hears ALIE’s crisp flat voice in her mind as Marcus thrusts into the gasping, quivering Abby, and even though her entire body is hot with mortification and she’s squirming a little in her seat, grateful that all the others can see are letters and numbers, she can’t look away because _something about this is wrong._

Raven didn’t have any sex inside the City of Light.  She didn’t have any desire to.  Not just because there was nobody there she had any interest in having sex _with,_ but because the urge itself had left her completely.  She was perfectly satisfied with ALIE’s small, simple pleasures.  Dark chocolate.  An infinite music library.  The beach.  The edges were smoothed off along with her memories, so the absence of pain was accompanied by the absence of _any_ potent emotion or sensation . . . which meant her sex drive was at zero.  Once, for reasons she couldn’t remember, she took down the steaming, pulsing showerhead from its hook on the gleaming marble wall and held it between her legs, not sure why except for the ghost of a memory that this was something that she used to do.  But ALIE hadn’t written those sensations into Raven’s code – there was no clit full of nerve endings to stimulate, no swelling orgasm rising up inside her.  It was just hot water on skin.  Nothing happened.

But something is clearly happening here.

Which meant ALIE _wants_ something to happen.  ALIE flipped the sex drive switch off inside everyone else’s minds – along with their memories and their pain – because it’s troublesome and ungovernable and she doesn’t understand it.  But she flipped it back on for Abby Griffin, whose synaptic blockers have been reset nearly a hundred times in two weeks, and Raven suddenly realizes why.

“Holy shit,” she whispers.  “Oh, _holy shit.”_

“What?” asks Monty urgently, staring in confusion at the wide grin dawning on Raven’s face.  “What is it, Raven?  What did you find?”

“Our way in,” she whispers, her voice thrumming with suppressed excitement, and the others draw in closer to look over her shoulder, trying in vain to see what she sees.

“What do you mean?”

“ALIE eliminates pain using two different kinds of synaptic blockers,” Raven explains.  “They don’t _erase_ anything, really, but they mute things.  One is for sensation, and one is for memory.  But Kane and Abby don’t have their sensory blockers on.  Please don’t ask me how I know that,” she adds hastily, cutting off the question as it forms on Harper’s lips.  “Just . . . trust me.  The blockers are off.  They can still feel things.”

“That explains the system resets, then, right?” asks Monty.  “That’s what’s not working.”  But Raven shakes her head.

“Kane’s only been reset once,” she says, clicking on the keyboard to open his code, and even Monty can see what she’s showing him.

“At the same time as Abby,” he says. 

“Yeah, but look at this,” she tells him.   “Abby was averaging anywhere from five to ten resets a _day_ before Kane took the chip.  In the 48 hours since he’s been there, she’s only been reset that one time, when he was.”

“Okay, for those of us who don’t speak Super Computer Genius,” says Miller, “what the hell does all of this mean?”

“It means he’s a distraction,” Bryan says unexpectedly, staring up at the monitors with wide eyes, the first of all of them to put the pieces together.  “That’s what Raven meant about a way in.  He was supposed to distract her, and it's working."

"So it isn't the sensory blocker that's on the fritz," says Monty thoughtfully.  "ALIE dialed that one up because it’s the _other_ one that’s broken.”

“Holy shit,” murmurs Harper.  _“Abby’s starting to remember.”_

Raven nods, face glowing with triumphant delight.  “The ninety-seven resets weren’t on her sensory blockers,” she says, “they were for her _memories._   Abby didn’t want to take the chip in the first place; that must affect how much hold ALIE has over her.  It must mean a part of her is in there, trying to get out.  And all ALIE can do is keep rebooting her over and over.  But that takes a huge amount of system processing data. Abby's a massive liability," she explains.  "They can't kill her - not if their plan is to get to the Flame through Clarke.  They'll want to use Abby for that.  They need her alive.  But right now she's causing an _epic_ drain on ALIE's resources, which means ALIE has to figure out a way to keep her from needing to be reset so many times.  So she gambled - or, I bet, Jaha did - that having Kane right there with her would stop her from trying to break free and get back to him."

"That's like . . . super romantic, actually," says Miller, grinning. 

Bryan smacks him on the head.  _"Focus."_

"So what does that mean?" asks Harper, watching Raven's fingers fly across the keyboard.  "What are you going to do?"

"Abby's mind wants to remember," Raven tells her.  "So I'm going to give it a little nudge."

"Won't ALIE be able to see you?"

"Bet your ass she will," grins Raven.  "I'm _counting_ on it."

"What?"

"System reset drains power from the central processor," she tells them.  "ALIE can't maintain the firewall at full strength _and_ reset Abby at once.  She'll have to choose between keeping me out of the Citadel, or keeping Abby's memory blockers working.  Either way," she says firmly, her jaw clenched in determination, "one of us is getting to that killswitch."


	3. Chapter 3

It takes Raven the better part of the afternoon to rig up a screen of privacy coding around Abby and Kane inside the City of Light, but there’s only so much it can do.  It lets her monitor their neural pathways and ALIE’s simulation of their vital signs without being able to see or hear them.  (This proves a great disappointment to Miller, who hovers with unabashed curiosity over Raven’s shoulder, squinting at the screens.  “What’s that?  Is that them?  Are they doing it right now?  Is that what those numbers mean?  Am I looking at them doing it?”  “You’re looking at a parking lot, Miller, get out of my way.”)  But neural pathways mean _thoughts,_ so even though she can’t see or hear them, she’s still indisputably eavesdropping.  Spikes in blood pressure, dopamine, heart rate and breathing – or, more accurately, the simulation of them – tell her exactly when they’re doing . . . well, whatever they’re doing.

And they do it a _lot._

Once she forces herself past her initial discomfort at invading her friends’ personal lives without their knowledge, Raven spots the pattern right away.  The spikes in (simulated) vital signs directly correlate to a recurring blip in Abby’s code that appears to be an early-warning system.  ALIE has built in an alarm that goes off at the first sign of irregular activity involving Abby’s synaptic blockers, which automatically triggers a sharp spike in vital signs and sensory stimuli.

Or, to put it more simply: every time Abby starts to remember, ALIE cranks up her libido (and Kane’s) a few more notches, and by the time they’re finished, Abby has forgotten everything.

This makes things tricky. 

First, Raven has to catch Abby’s synaptic blockers beginning to weaken before ALIE does.  Which means she has to find a way to weaken them herself.  ALIE can rewrite the entire world around Kane and Abby to shield them from anything that might possibly trigger a stray memory, or distract them with sex until they forget.  Raven can’t wait for the synaptic blockers to fail on her own; she’s going to have to force it.  She needs a Trojan horse – something she can plant inside the City of Light where Kane and Abby will find it, which is guaranteed to trigger both their memories.  But it will need a powerful firewall ALIE can’t breach, and she only has the bandwidth for something small.  It will have to be unobtrusive enough to slip right beneath ALIE’s routine maintenance scans, and she can’t draw their attention without drawing ALIE’s, which means she’ll have to wait for them to find it, and then hope it causes a synaptic failure powerful enough to make ALIE launch a dual reset.  And that’s when the fun will start, because ALIE doesn’t have enough power to run two resets of that magnitude back-to-back without letting the system restabilize.  So either ALIE will have to wait seven full minutes before erasing their memories a second time – which is plenty long enough for Raven to bring back enough memories to cause massive damage – or she’ll be forced to divert power away from the City of Light’s most gargantuan energy drain:

Namely, the firewall around the Citadel.

So she has to make them remember everything, and she has to do it without getting caught.  If ALIE finds her trap before Kane and Abby do, it’s all over.

She builds her Trojan horse with care and hides it innocently in plain sight, where she hopes to God they will find it. 

The first part of the plan works; her bug blends in perfectly.  ALIE’s scans breeze right past it.

So she watches the infinite line of code scroll down her bank of screens, and she waits.

 _Come on, Abby,_ she pleads silently.  _Come on.  Remember._

* * *

But she doesn’t.

She doesn’t remember anything.

She’s dimly aware that there’s a world outside this apartment, but she’s lost all interest in it.  If she isn’t fucking Marcus, she’s thinking about fucking Marcus, or preparing to fuck Marcus, or savoring a tantalizing delay to make fucking Marcus even more pleasurable.  Her desire has expanded to become something she can no longer control, and she’s simply yielded, letting it control her instead.  The outside world grows dimmer every passing day, though there’s still a faint ghost of something – or maybe the ghost of the _absence_ of something – that flits from time to time at the very furthest corner of her memory, during unexpected moments of stillness.  Like right now, as Marcus comes with a hard, heavy groan inside her, filling her to the brim with hot liquid warmth, and then collapses, spent, against her breast.  She cradles him close as they both catch their breath, caressing his hair, and a strange sensation begins to pulse inside her chest.  It’s a tightening, a constricting, almost as though she were . . . _missing_ him?  _But that’s absurd,_ she thinks to herself.  _How can I miss him when he’s right here?_  

There is no pain in the City of Light, so she doesn’t feel sadness, not exactly.  It’s more like a strange sensation of hollowness – a thing that was supposed to be there inside her, but now isn’t.  Puzzled, she wraps her arms around him more tightly and buries her face in his soft hair, closing her eyes and trying to concentrate on the hollow place, and then something very peculiar happens.  Inside the darkness behind her eyelids, inside this bubble of perfect bliss where nothing exists except the delicious sensations flooding her body and the man she holds in her arms, she begins to sense . . . a thing.

She doesn’t know what it is, it’s too far away to reach, but she can somehow feel it signaling to her.  The hollowness inside her begins to give her a strange feeling, and she suddenly knows without knowing how she knows it that the elusive thing she’s reaching out for belongs to her and she’s somehow lost it.  She strains herself to reach it, but it evades her again and again.  It’s like she’s submerged in a dark midnight sea, floating weightlessly near the surface, and down down down in the blackest ocean depths, the faintest flickering of a light is rising up towards her.  She tries to swim down towards the light, stretching out her hand, but –

“You okay?” Marcus asks, kissing his way up her throat to murmur quietly in her ear, and just like that the ghost light and the hollow place inside her disappear completely.  She hums a happy little sigh as his beard brushes lightly over her skin.

“Wonderful,” she murmurs, as his mouth finally makes its way to hers, his lips and tongue warm and delicious against her own.  He always tastes like whatever thing she’s most craving, and whatever part of her mind might once have registered that as suspicious has long since been dulled into stupor by relentless pleasure.  Tonight it’s a rich red wine.  As he breathes into her mouth, she begins to feel intoxicated, drunk off his kisses, and the ghost light rising up through the dark water towards her begins to sink back down into the depths again.  What was it, the thing she was trying to remember?  It doesn’t matter now, with Marcus’ body pressing down against hers, sweat-sheened and hot and impossibly strong, with his insistent tongue licking hungrily into her mouth, tasting spicy and sweet and making her lightheaded. 

Nothing else matters but her and Marcus.  Nothing else matters but this.

Marcus reaches over toward the nightstand to fumble around for the particular device he’s looking for, and she begins to shiver with anticipatory pleasure.  The trunk at the foot of their bed is stocked full of a wide range of accessories, and by this point – after weeks inside the City of Light – they’ve experimented with them all.  Marcus’ favorite is the massive, deliciously smooth contraption Abby wears strapped across her hips with a silken harness, the one that lets her bring him to dizzying heights of new and unexpected sensation as she glides inside of him from behind and turns him inside-out with pleasure.  Abby’s favorite is small and rose-colored and oblong, fitting perfectly in the palm of Marcus’ hand so he can hold it against her clit and let its vibrations sing through her body while his cock pumps in and out of her cunt.  And there are dozens more, all shapes and sizes - some smooth, some vibrating, some specially made to use in the bath.

It's the largest device of the whole collection that he grabs off the nightstand as he begins to kiss his way down her body, tracing the tip of an absolutely massive artificial cock down between her breasts and over her stomach to the warm, aching juncture between her thighs.  “Oh, I like that one,” she sighs happily, settling back against the pillows as the silken cock slips nearer and nearer to her still-drenched cunt.

“I know how you do,” Marcus murmurs, and she can hear the hint of a laugh in his voice as he lowers his head and gets to work. 

ALIE adjusts the pain filters down almost to base level, just at the beginning; sometimes Abby wants him rough, and likes to feel stretched open nearly to bursting point so she’s just a little bit sore afterwards.  It gives her a wider range of sensations to savor as she drifts off to sleep.  So ALIE dials up every nerve ending, letting her feel it, letting her cry out with a moan that’s nearly a scream as the velvety black surface disappears deeper and deeper inside her.  Marcus fucks her with impeccable precision, exactly as hard as she likes it, while his mouth is busy hungrily devouring her cunt.  It’s sticky and messy and delicious and he burrows deeply down inside her with his lips and tongue and beard, pumping the smooth black surface of the artificial cock in and out, in and out. 

ALIE’s map of Marcus Kane’s neural pathways includes a meticulously detailed library of sensory receptor data; she can calculate down to each individual taste bud exactly what combination of oral and olfactory stimuli he finds the most pleasurable.  Which means he’s never tasted anything in his whole life as good as the way Abby Griffin tastes, and his passion for it is very nearly an addiction.  He nuzzles in deeper and deeper, his tongue lapping up her sticky wetness as she quivers beneath him.  It doesn’t take her long to come again, gasping his name breathlessly as her back arches off the mattress, clutching frantically at his hair where his head rests between her thighs.  As Abby’s orgasm begins to recede and she closes her eyes, panting and breathless in the darkness, the ghost of the thing she’s trying to remember begins to float back upwards toward the periphery of her mind once more.  ALIE can’t afford another system reset right now – she’s in the middle of massive security upgrades to the perimeter firewall, after her scans detected signs of an attempted breach earlier today – so she increases their sensory stimuli by another 20%.  Marcus nuzzles in deeper, the taste of Abby warm and wet against his tongue, and she comes again and again, but it’s not enough.  Not even this is powerful enough to make Abby forget the thing she’s trying to remember.

There are forty-seven minutes left before ALIE’s security upgrades are complete and she can run a manual reset.  She only needs to keep them occupied for that long. 

Abby reaches down and clutches at Marcus’ shoulders.  “Forget the fake one,” she whispers hoarsely.  “I need you.  I need it to be you.  Come back to me.”  She tugs at him until he reluctantly tears his mouth away from the liquid warmth at her center, messily kissing his way back up her body until his lips crash wetly against hers.  “I need you,” she whimpers again, and he growls in response, seizing her in his arms and lifting her off the bed.  “What are you doing?” she whispers hoarsely, and he gives her a dangerous, wicked smile.

“We’ve never done it standing up before,” he points out, carrying her over to the upholstered wall beside the bed, and she shivers in anticipation at the hungry look in his eyes.  Bracing her back against the softly padded wall, she wraps her sleek, powerful thighs tightly around his waist as he grips her ass in his powerful hands and plunges deep inside.

The angle of entry changes everything, as he surges up inside her instead of straight in, and she gasps at the sensation.  Digging her angles into his hips, she pulls him closer and closer until she’s pressed up so tightly between the wall and his body that she doesn’t need to hold on anymore.  She tangles her hands in his hair, guiding him down to take her nipples in his mouth and suck at them, hard and hungry.  “You feel so good like this,” she murmurs breathlessly as he thrusts into her over and over.  “Oh God, Marcus, you feel so good.”

“You feel so good too,” he growls into her throat, the hard sculpted muscles of his ass flexing and contracting over and over as his body plunges into hers, making her gasp and tremble.  “God, I love fucking you.  I just hate that I can’t fuck you and taste you at the same time.”

Abby laughs breathlessly at this, but he’s serious, eyes dark and heavy with lust.  “Well, no, not the way you’re thinking,” she concedes, “but I think we can improvise a partial solution.”  Then she slides a hand down between her thighs and brings it back up to him, shining with her own juices, and traces a wet fingertip along his bottom lip.

“Better?” she smiles, then gasps as he opens his mouth and takes her fingers inside, sucking hungrily, sweeping his rough tongue across her fingers to capture the taste of her.

It’s like an addiction, the way Abby tastes, and it does something to Marcus every time.  Something inside him snaps, and he thrusts into her harder, faster, deeper, her moans of ecstasy only spurring him onward.  “More,” he begs, so she gives him more, stroking her clit until her thighs begin to tremble and her fingers glisten and then letting him devour her, feeding him the essence of her and feeling him grow wilder and wilder inside of her with each taste.

They come together, hard and frantic, but they’re both so dazed with pleasure that they don’t even notice anything out of the ordinary when ALIE, once again, dials Kane’s refractory period down to less than thirty seconds.  “More,” Abby pleads as he surges back to life inside her again, and clutches at his shoulders as he begins all over again.

They come in perfect unison four times before ALIE’s upgrades are completed and she lets them finish.  Marcus carries a limp, trembling Abby back over to the mattress and then sinks down heavily beside her.  They don’t actually _need_ to sleep in the City of Light – or eat, or bathe for that matter – but both Marcus and Abby love the sensation of falling asleep in each other’s arms, and it’s significantly easier to monitor Abby during a REM cycle than when she’s conscious, so sleep is something that ALIE gently encourages. 

Abby is limp and sated and dizzy, all traces of troubling memories now a thousand miles away, and as Marcus pulls her into his arms she drifts off almost immediately, head pillowed against his chest. 

Satisfied, ALIE departs to focus her attention elsewhere.  The ghost light below the surface of the water begins to rise and rise, waiting for Abby to wake up and begin to remember.

* * *

The day everything ends dawns just like every other day.

The sun streams in through the filmy white curtains over the balcony, and Abby can feel it on her hypersensitized bare skin, stirring her into wakefulness.  ALIE controls their subconscious thoughts too, so Abby awakens smiling from a dream about lying beside Marcus on a white sand beach, gazing across blue water.  It’s so real she can still smell the fresh snap of salt-air breezes as she returns to the world.  

“Morning,” she says sleepily to the already-awake Marcus, yawning and stretching by her side.

“Morning,” he smiles back, and presses a warm kiss against her mouth as he rolls over on top of her and settles comfortably against her body, pressing her down into the soft mattress.  Abby laughs, reaching her small hand down below their bodies to feel how hard he already is.

“Pleasant dreams?” she asks dryly, arching one eyebrow at him, and he doesn’t even bother to deny it.  “What about?”

“Why don’t I show you?”

“I think you should,” she agrees, wrapping her arms around his back and pulling him down to her.

They have no idea it’s the last time.  They believe they have an infinity of lazy sunny mornings together.  Nothing feels particularly unusual about this one.  

Back in Polis, ALIE’s army is swarming up the sides of the Polis tower to the room where Clarke sits unconscious on the Commander’s throne, but Marcus and Abby don’t know that.  

Abby has no idea, as she smiles up at Marcus and opens her thighs and whispers his name, that Jackson isn’t in the City of Light anymore, that Murphy and Clarke saved him with Raven’s machine because they needed a doctor to perform a transfusion with Ontari’s blood.  

She has no idea, as Marcus slides wet and hard and deep into her, making her gasp, that their bodies in the real world are locked in a dusty, forgotten room where they kneel together in unconscious silence, or that Indra and Octavia have broken down the door and are shaking them both, begging them to wake up.  All she knows is that Marcus’ hard cock inside her feels like heaven and she never wants it to stop.

Marcus has no idea, as his back rises and falls above hers and his breathing deepens into desperate groans of pleasure, that ALIE has reached a state which in a human being might be considered something like panic.  He has no idea that back in Arkadia, Raven has slipped in through the back door and that her plan is already in place.   All he knows is that when he comes this time it’s wild, frantic, electric, and it doesn’t ease anything in his body, it doesn’t sate him, it just makes him want more.

Abby feels it too, staring up at him with wide, dazed eyes as her own orgasm subsides.  “Don’t stop,” she whispers.  “I know I just came, but don’t stop.  Please, Marcus.  You can’t stop.”

“Never,” he whispers, and they’re both so drunk on desire that it doesn’t even seem strange to them that he’s iron-hard again already, even though Abby is still full of his warm wetness and can feel it running down the insides of her thighs.

Hours pass, their bodies locked together in an endless cycle of rising and release.  ALIE can’t afford a system reset, which means she can’t afford to let them think about anything else besides each other until her army finds a way to get to Clarke and remove the Commander’s Flame.  So the moment their orgasms subside, leaving them shaking and gasping in each other’s arms, it only takes a heartbeat for them to be ready for more. 

There’s a dim distant part of Marcus Kane’s mind that knows his body doesn’t ordinarily work like this – coming inside her with a powerful burst, softening just for a moment to catch his breath, then surging instantly back into aching iron hardness once more – but Abby feels so good that he can’t quite bring himself to think about it too seriously.  By the time they finally stop – bodies so shattered by orgasm after orgasm that ALIE trusts there will be no need for a manual reset – they can’t do anything except collapse against each other in a sweaty, panting heap of tangled limbs and immediately drift back off to sleep.

 

* * *

Abby’s famished when she wakes up again – another artificial simulation ALIE has created for them.  Food is easy; the neurobiological responses of flavor and scent and digestion are far less complex to simulate than the physical interaction of human bodies, so ALIE encourages them to eat as well as sleep, even though they don’t need to.  Abby wakes with a craving for something sweet, so she pulls on her favorite nightgown – a long, billowing slip of rose-and-green floral silk – and makes her way to the kitchen, where a tray of warm _pain au chocolat_ and a pot of coffee sit waiting. 

The part of Abby’s mind that would register the near-magical sudden appearance of food as an unusual occurrence has long since gone dormant; at first she required a simulation as close to reality as possible, with anything too out-of-the-ordinary triggering suspicion or causing a glitch in the synaptic blockers, so ALIE built them a world where tasks and activities took a little bit of time.  Where water must be boiled for tea, where clothes had to be removed from hangers and put on instead of just appearing.

But now Abby simply accepts it without question.  She wanted coffee and croissants, so here they are.

This is her life now.

Marcus pads quietly into the kitchen a few moments after she does, a midnight blue silk robe tied around his waist.  “Hi,” he says, taking a croissant from the tray and joining her where she stands at the wide kitchen window, looking out at the city spread out below their balcony.

“Hi,” she says back, smiling.  “Want to go sit outside?” 

They enjoy their coffee and croissants on the balcony in amicable silence.  Abby is serenely immersed in a sea of pleasurable sensations – warm sunshine against bare shoulders, rich dark chocolate melting against her tongue, the bittersweet aroma of strong black coffee, and the full-body relaxation of infinite orgasms followed by heavy sleep.  No conscious thoughts intrude into the pleasant isolation of her happy little bubble.

Until Marcus shatters the silence – and the illusion – with an entirely innocent question.

“Was that always there?”

She looks up sharply, the confusion in his voice causing a distant ping of alertness inside her mind, and she follows his gaze to see what he’s pointing at.  He’s staring, brow furrowed, at the corner of the railing where a profusion of exotic flowering plants in huge pots sit near their little table, a riot of color and fragrance brightening the clean white-and-glass lines of the balcony.  Abby likes flowers, so ALIE put them in every room.  She reassures Marcus that the flowers were there before.  “Maybe you just didn’t notice them.”

“Not the flower pots,” he says, shaking his head.  “That.”

And that’s when Abby sees it.

At the base of the row of huge stone planters, overflowing with boldly-colored blossoms, sits a tiny ornamental evergreen tree.

She sees immediately what Marcus meant. The other pots are round and massive and made of gleaming earthenware, glazed to a shine and painted in bold colors.  The tree, by contrast, sits in a humble little tin rectangle which matches nothing else in their home.  Abby doesn’t think she’s ever noticed it before.  But, of course, trees don’t just appear out of nowhere.  “It must have been,” she tells him reassuringly.  “We just didn’t see it.”

“It does look familiar,” he muses, frowning, “or the tree does anyway.  Was it in a different pot?”

“I haven’t touched it,” says Abby, “so that must be the pot it came in.  I’m sure it came with the apartment.”

“We didn’t bring it with us?” he asks, rising from his seat to kneel down beside the tree and examine it more closely.  “Because I feel like I remember digging it up out of the ground . . . or was I planting it _in_ the ground?  But no, it can’t be that, because then how would it be here?”

“Bring it with us from where?” Abby asks reasonably.  “We’ve _always_ lived here.”

“Oh,” he says, a little uncertainly.  “That’s right.  I’d forgotten.”

But he can’t shake the feeling that there’s something peculiar about the tree, and the ghost light in the back of Abby’s mind surges up and up towards the surface, always just out of reach, like a mental itch she can’t scratch. 

Marcus carries the little tree over to the small sunny table where Abby sits with her coffee, and they both study it carefully.  There’s something odd about it they can’t quite place, as though it’s different in some fundamental way from everything else around them.  It looks perfectly ordinary, but something about it feels just the faintest bit . . . out of focus? Blurry?  As though it’s not quite of this world. 

Which, of course, is ridiculous.  So she says nothing out loud.  Still, something peculiar begins to happen as she studies the little tree, attempting to puzzle out this confounding mystery of why it feels both so familiar and so strange to her.  She suddenly realizes that the harder she tries to think about the tree, the more forcefully her desire for Marcus rises up in her body, tempting her to forget about it and abandon herself to him completely.  But for once, she fights back against it.  There’s a mystery here, and she somehow knows that it’s desperately important, and it takes all her strength to push through the cloud of lust fogging her brain so she can concentrate.  She hears a hitch in Marcus’ breathing across the table and even though she can’t let herself look at him, she knows the same thing is happening to him.

 _Don’t look at Marcus,_ she tells herself sternly.  _Look at the tree.  You need to remember where the tree came from.  You’ve seen this before, but it wasn’t here.  Where was it?_  

She wants to tug open Marcus’ robe and sit down on his lap and ride him, hard, as his lips find her nipples and his fingers stroke her clit. 

She wants to drop to her knees and push his thighs open and take him between her hungry wet lips, suddenly aching with a craving for his earthy-savory taste and the delicious weight of his cock filling her mouth and throat. 

She wants to grip the metal balcony rail so hard her knuckles turn white while he seizes her ass in his big rough hands and thrusts into her from behind. 

She’s wet between the thighs and her nipples are aching and her whole body feels warm and soft, and it would be so easy to just give in, she can have anything she wants, no pleasure will ever be denied her, and she wants to come so badly she can hardly see straight, and all she has to do is let go and stop thinking about this stupid little tree.  It would be so easy.

 _Let go,_ whispers a voice in her mind that she knows isn’t her own.  _Let go, Abby, and take what you want._

Marcus rises from his seat, as if drawn towards her with a violent magnetic force, and sinks to his knees beside her, his face resting in her lap.  “I have to touch you,” he whispers, his hands sliding up her thighs beneath her silk skirts.  “Abby . . . I feel . . . I don’t know why it feels like this . . . I need you so badly but I know we shouldn’t . . . but I don’t know _why_ – “

“Because we’ll forget,” she whispers, fighting back the urge to grasp his hair and pull his mouth up to hers.  “Something’s happening to us, Marcus.  It’s like there’s something I’m trying to remember . . .”

“You feel it too?”

“It’s the tree,” she pants, her body screaming out for release as Marcus’ hands glide over her skin.  “You were right.  There’s something about the tree.”

“I don’t know how to fight this,” he murmurs, slipping her skirt up over her thighs to press kisses against her smooth white skin.  “How do we fight this?”

“I don’t know,” she whispers back, unable to stop herself from shifting forward in her seat and parting her thighs even wider, opening herself up to him.  “But we have to.  We have to.”

She presses her eyes closed, disappearing just for a moment into the darkness behind her eyelids like she did the night before.  She’s reaching for something, lost in that inky black sea, hunting for the ghost light, and somehow she knows that if she lets herself go, she’ll never find it.  So she bites her lip and swallows hard and stands up to move away from Marcus, forcing herself not to think about how badly she wants him inside her.  Instead she reaches out her hand and touches the soil at the base of the tree.

And that’s when it happens.

“There’s something in here,” she tells Marcus suddenly, her fingertips grazing something hard and cold buried in the soil near the tree’s delicate roots.  He rises to his feet to get a closer look, careful to keep the whole width of the table between them, both of them now wary of getting too close.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

She digs gently with her fingers, brushing the dirt carefully away, until she unearths a small metal box. 

Marcus stares at Abby.

Abby stares at Marcus.

The tree could, perhaps, be explained – there are potted plants all over this balcony, perhaps they simply never noticed it – but burying a tin box under the roots of a plant is the kind of thing they would remember.

Which means either someone else left the box here  . . . or someone is making them forget things.

Abby is sweating, trembling, hardly able to stand still.  Her desire for Marcus is a force tugging her away from the metal box now sitting on the table, like she’s a rope being pulled violently in two directions.  “I want you so badly,” she whispers. 

“No, you were right,” he insists, “we have to open the box.”  But his jaw is clenched and his brow is beaded with sweat and Abby can see that he’s fully erect and absolutely desperate for release.  They’re so dizzied with lust they’re nearly in _pain_ , and every attempt Abby makes to reach out for the box only makes it worse. 

“I think I’m going to faint,” she manages to force out through gritted teeth, and a sharp hissing intake of breath from Marcus alerting her that he feels the same hot-cold ache of desire she does. 

“Go fast,” he advises her.  “Don’t think.  Just do it.  You can do this.” 

She nods, takes a breath, and reaches out with lightning-quick hands to pry open the hinged metal lid, then squints at it in confusion, unsure if she’s really seeing what she thinks she’s seeing.

“What is it?” he asks, coming around the table to stand beside her – in dangerously close proximity – to read the baffling message written on the inside of the lid in heavy black letters:

“DON’T TAKE ANYTHING OUT OF THIS BOX!” 

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” says Abby, puzzled, but by unspoken agreement they both obey.  They lean in to peer curiously at the five small items inside the square tin, but they don’t touch any of them.

Two metal rings – one light, one dark. 

A watch with a silver band. 

A metal pendant shaped like an origami paper bird, hanging on a leather cord. 

And, most puzzlingly of all, a small plastic ampoule of water.

“What on earth is _that?”_ Abby wonders, pointing to it.

“That’s how you water the tree,” Marcus responds almost absently, without even thinking, and then stops short, realizing what he’s said.

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t know,” he whispers, eyes wide.  “I don’t know.”

“Marcus,” Abby hisses, panic beginning to rise in her throat, _“what’s happening to us?”_

“There is nothing to be concerned about,” comes a pleasant voice from behind them, and they turn to see a woman in a red dress standing just outside the balcony door.  “Abby, I need you to give me the items in that box.”

They remember ALIE, very faintly – she visits sometimes, and brings them things, and the city appears to belong to her in a way they don’t fully understand – but it’s become too risky to let them remember more than that.  But the moment they turn around, they can feel her dialing up their sex drives even further – they’re both now at over 200% of their regular levels – and they can hardly breathe.  Abby’s nipples are hard and aching beneath the silk of her slip, and every move she makes causes the fabric to brush against them with a sizzle of pleasure so hot it’s nearly painful. 

“ _You’re_ doing this,” she suddenly exclaims, turning to ALIE with an accusatory stare, as a dim awareness that _this is not the real world_ begins to coalesce inside her mind.  “It’s you.  _You’re_ doing this to us.”

“This is not a punishment, Abby,” ALIE explains in a gentle voice.  “I am offering both of you exactly what you desire.  My function is to remove pain and suffering.  I have given you a world which consists instead of nothing but pleasure.  A world to which you may return at any time, for as long as you please – as soon as you give to me the items inside that box.”

“How does Marcus know about watering the tree?” Abby demands.  “Where have I seen those rings before?”

“These questions are counterproductive,” says ALIE.  “I have removed the painful memories attached to these items for your protection.  They would prove deleterious to your state of happiness inside the City of Light.” 

“Then why did you leave them here, if we weren’t supposed to find them?”

“I did not,” says ALIE.  “The box is not of my creation.  It is secured by a firewall, which I cannot breach.  Only you have access.  Even Marcus does not.”  Marcus looks at Abby, puzzled, and reaches out a hand for the box.  Sure enough, his hand stops short several inches away, as though blocked by an invisible force.  “Someone has infiltrated my programming,” says ALIE.  “Such a breach could endanger the structural stability of the entire City of Light.  It is imperative that this virus be contained and destroyed.  Please hand me the items inside the box.”

It would be so easy.  She could just hand ALIE the box and then tear open Marcus’ robe and let him hitch her skirt up to her hips and push her up against the wall, feel him reach his powerful hands down beneath her thighs to lift her up so she can wrap her legs around him, opening herself up, letting him plunge deeply inside her, and then it would all be over, this torture of desire would fade away and she would be sated, her thirst quenched.  Everything would feel better if Marcus was inside of her.  Everything would be fixed.

But “She doesn’t want us to have these things,” Marcus says firmly, cutting into her reverie, “so they must be dangerous to her.  Which means they’re important.  We have to remember, Abby.  We have to remember what they mean.  They’re not from ALIE, which means they’re a message.  Someone is trying to get through.”

“Griffin, Abigail Anne Walters.  Resident #251,” says ALIE pleasantly, and Abby feels a surge of something like fear crash through the volcanic waves of desire coursing through her, attempting to block out all other sensation.  “Kane, Marcus Hector.  Resident #1863.”

And then it happens. 

The words “Griffin” and “Walters” collide inside Abby’s mind with the two small rings inside the metal box, and then she remembers everything, just as Marcus hears ALIE say his father’s name and remembers why it is that he knows exactly how to water the tree.

“Commencing dual system reset in five – “

“I remember,” Marcus tells her urgently.  “I remember everything.  Abby, we can’t let her – “

“Four – “

“It’s Jake’s watch, he gave it to Clarke, we have to find Clarke – “

“Three – “

“They were looking for Clarke, Abby, when I came to Polis, ALIE was – “

“Two – “

“Marcus, the killswitch, we have to get to the Citadel – “

 “One.”

* * *

Abby opens her eyes and blinks a few times, surprised by the brightness of the sunlight.  She’d been in bed with Marcus just a few minutes ago, and is startled to find herself suddenly outside, but that happens from time to time and she’s learned not to worry about it. 

“Morning,” says Marcus, smiling at her over his coffee.  “What did you bring me?”

“What?”

“That box,” he says, pointing.  “What’s in it?”

Abby peers down at the box.  It’s covered in dirt, as though it was dug out of somewhere, but there’s no dirt anywhere nearby – no plants on the balcony, no gardens or greenery up here 25 stories above the ground.  The balcony is a vast clean unbroken expanse of white marble and shining glass, spotless and pristine.

So where did the soil come from?

“What’s in the box?” Marcus asks again, sipping his coffee, and unable to resist the mystery, she opens it.  But there’s nothing inside except a few pieces of metal, and some words scratched on the inside of the lid.

“Looks like junk,” she says.  “Wonder where it came from.”

Marcus shrugs, dismissing it from his mind.  Abby closes the lid of the box and pushes it aside, sipping her coffee and enjoying the pleasant warmth of the sun on her skin.  But her eyes drift back from time to time to the tin box on the table in front of her – the box neither she nor Marcus can remember having placed there – and wondering why the watch and the rings look so familiar to her.  Even the necklace seems to remind her of someone, she just can’t remember who.

“Where the hell did you come from?” she murmurs absently at the box, and then the most improbable thing in all the world happens.

The box answers back.

“Oh, thank fucking God,” says a vibrant female voice – decidedly _not_ ALIE’s – startling both of them so badly that Marcus drops his coffee, shattering the cup on the cold marble balcony floor.  “It worked!  The breach stayed open when she rebooted you.  Monty, get in here!  I did it!  I’m _fucking awesome!_   Okay, listen, Abby, we don’t have much time.”

“What . . . who  . . . what?” Abby splutters, mind reeling in confusion.  She lifts up the box, searching inside and under it for some sign, but it’s a perfectly ordinary box.  “Who are you?  What’s happening?  How are you doing this?”

“You know who I am, Abby,” says the voice.  “I need you to remember.  Okay?  I need you both to remember.  You know me.  You’re in the City of Light because of me.  You did it to save my life.  Do you remember?  Do you remember how you got there?”

The ghost light in the distant darkness begins to glow just a little bit brighter, as though it’s moving towards her, and Abby reaches out through the void, struggling to pull it closer.

“I don’t know how I got here,” she says uncertainly.  “I was just . . . here.  I was always here.”

“No, you weren’t,” says the voice.  “You swallowed a blue chip that gave control of your mind to ALIE and she brought you to the City of Light.  You did it to save me.  I need you to remember.  We don’t have much time.  Look in the box, Abby.  Look at the things inside the box.  One of them is mine.  Can you tell me which one it is?”

She looks up at Marcus, but he shakes his head.  He doesn’t know the answer either, but she can see in his eyes that he believes the voice.  He understands, somehow, that this is important.  They stare down into the box, looking at each item in succession.

“It’s not this one,” Marcus says suddenly, pointing to the small plastic ampoule of water – the one item in the box that doesn’t quite go with the others, which are all jewelry.

“How do you know?”

“Because that one’s mine.”

“Yes!” exclaims the voice.  “Good.  That’s good, Kane.  You’re so close.  That one used to be yours.  Do you remember what it was for?”

“Was it . . .” he starts to say, then stops.  “There was dirt on the lid of the box,” he says, somewhat at random, and Abby doesn’t make the connection, but the voice does.

“Yes!  Good!  The dirt and the water go together.  Do you remember why?”

He furrows his brow, trying to remember, as Abby stares at the rings, the watch and the necklace, trying frantically to place them.  “You can do this, Abby,” says the voice.  “I know you can.  The water belongs to Kane.  Three of the others belong to you.  And one of them is mine.  I was wearing it the last time you saw me.  When you saved my life by taking the chip.  Do you remember?”

“I don’t know,” she says helplessly, “everything’s cloudy – I don’t remember any place that isn’t here.”

“Do you remember the Citadel?” the voice asks.  “Do you remember why you were trying to get to the killswitch?  It was just a minute ago, before ALIE erased your memories again.  It was all starting to come back.  Do you remember?”

“The Citadel?”

“You can open up a doorway for me to get inside and shut it down,” says the voice, its pitch rising in urgency.  “But you have to say the password.  You have to tell me the names of all the people the things in that box belong to.  If you can remember that, she won’t be able to reset you without diverting power from the Citadel firewall.”

“Raven, what are you talking about?” Abby fires back in exasperation, and only the shocked look on Marcus’ face as his eyes snap up sharply to meet her own gives her a sign of what’s just happened.

“That’s my girl!” crows the voice in ecstatic relief.  “Say it.  Say my name again.”

“Raven,” Abby breathes in astonished wonder, and just like that, the pieces begin to slide into place.

“It’s the necklace,” says Marcus.  “It used to hang from the mirror of her car.”

“You were wearing it,” says Abby.  “You were wearing it when I saw you.”

“Yes.”

“You were wearing it the very first time I met you.”

“Do you remember how we met, Abby? Do you remember the escape pod?”

She squeezes her eyes shut, feeling the ghost light so close to her that she thinks she could reach out and touch it.  The most important thing she’s supposed to remember – the thing that’s meant to live inside her, where the hollow place is now – is still just out of reach.  Raven was only the first piece.

_How does she know Raven?  Who is Raven?_

“The tree,” says Marcus sharply, and Abby’s eyes fly open.  “Abby.  There was a tree.  You dug this box out of the dirt under a tree.”

“Who did the tree belong to, Kane?”

“It was . . . it was here, on the balcony, it must have been – “

“No, the _real_ tree,” presses Raven.  “Nothing in the City of Light is real.  The tree was an illusion, just like the box and everything in it.  ALIE made you forget because it was too painful, but if you remember the tree it will all come back.  Where’s the real tree, Kane?”

“It’s . . . in the woods.”

“Yes!  Good!  Why is it in the woods?”

“Because my mother is dead,” he says abruptly, and the bubble around them shatters.

“I remember,” says Abby, waves of memories rushing back into her mind like a flood.  “Raven, I remember everything.”

“I knew you could do it!” Raven exclaims triumphantly.  “Now listen up, because we’re almost out of time.  ALIE’s going to come back and try to reset your memories, but there’s still two minutes on the clock before she does.  The box is a virus that can open a backdoor gateway for me straight to the killswitch if somebody inside the City of Light says the password.”

Abby nods.  “Just tell me what to do.” 

Marcus reaches out to take her hand.

“I need you to pick up each item one at a time,” says Raven, “and tell me who they belonged to.  Doesn’t matter which order.  Take it out of the box and say their names.”

Abby nods, taking a deep breath.

“Vera Kane,” she says, squeezing Marcus’ hand as she lifts the plastic bottle of water that Vera used to water the Eden Tree out of the box and sets it on the table, followed by the necklace.  “Raven Reyes.”

“Good,” says Raven.  “You’re doing good.”

“Abby Griffin,” she says, with a tiny catch in her voice, as she lifts out the gold ring that’s supposed to be on her finger – the ring ALIE took away from her, to keep her from remembering the name she says next.  “Jake Griffin.”  The dark ring goes next to the other one on the table, and Marcus squeezes her hand.

There’s nothing left in the box but the watch.

“Jake Griffin,” she says again as she lifts his watch out of the box and sets it down, but she somehow knows it’s the wrong answer. 

“No,” says Raven impatiently.  “No, Abby, you have to remember.  This is the most important thing.  She’s inside the Citadel, we’re going for the killswitch together, but I can’t open the door and get inside until you say her name.”

“Griffin, Abigail Anne Walters.  Resident #251,” says a cool, formal voice from behind them.

“God _fucking_ dammit, ALIE!” exclaims Raven, and they can hear her slam her fist on the desk in frustration.  “Abby, we’re out of time.  You have to remember.”

“Kane, Marcus Hector.  Resident #1863.”

“Raven, I don’t – “

“He gave the watch to you at the airlock, Abby, so you could give it to her!  Say her name!  Abby, you have to say her name or it’s all over!”

She’s lost in the dark sea, the ghost light floating just out of reach, the missing piece of her that left her hollow when ALIE took it away.  _Who used to wear this watch?_

“Abby, you have a daughter,” says Marcus, and Abby can see in his eyes that he’s gotten there one step ahead of her.  He remembers everything.  “You and Jake had a daughter.  ALIE’s been hunting for her, so she made you forget.  The day Jake died, he gave you his watch, so you could give it to her.  You told me.  I remember.”

“Marcus, I can’t –“

“Commencing dual system reset in five – “

“Fight,” Marcus presses her, squeezing both her hands in his own.  “Abby, you can do this.”

“Four – “

“Abby, come on!” Raven barks at her, “the breach is closing and you’re the only one who can let me through.”

 “Three – “

“She has blonde hair, like Jake did,” say Marcus urgently, “and blue eyes, and you love her more than anything in the world.”

 “Two – “

And then suddenly she knows.

 _“Clarke Griffin,”_ Abby cries out as loudly as she can, the ghost light in the darkness crystallizing before her eyes into her daughter’s perfect, beautiful face, and the last thing she remembers is the shimmering outline of a door opening in the sky above her as ALIE says “One” and the world goes black.

* * *

 

Abby opens her eyes and blinks a few times, surprised by the brightness of the sunlight.  She’d been in bed with Marcus just a few minutes ago, and is startled to find herself suddenly outside, but that happens from time to time and she’s learned not to worry about it. 

“Morning,” says Marcus, smiling at her over his coffee.  “What did you bring me?”

“What?”

“That box,” he says, pointing.  “What’s in it?”

She opens the lid and peers down inside it.  “Nothing,” she says.  “It’s empty.  Wonder where it came from.”  Marcus shrugs and sips his coffee, immediately losing interest.  And, after a moment, so does she. 

It’s a beautiful day, the sun sparkling down across the blue water they can see from the pristine whiteness of their balcony.  They can’t see the Citadel from here.  They can’t see anything except the impenetrable bubble ALIE has built around them, cutting them off from everyone else inside the City of Light.  Far, far away, ALIE and Raven are battling for control of the city, building up and tearing down walls, flooding rivers and building bridges, lighting fires and bringing on storms – all so Raven can bring Clarke through the gateway she opened to the killswitch, while ALIE’s army rushes to stop her.

But Clarke and Raven are as far distant as if they had never existed.  As the city descends into chaos around Marcus and Abby, they sit in perfect, serene contentment on a sunny balcony, drinking coffee and eating chocolate croissants. 

 “Are you sure this box isn’t yours?” Abby asks Marcus again as she finishes her coffee and sets down the cup.

“Nope. Not mine.”

“I wonder how it got on our balcony.”

“Do you want to sit out here and solve the Mystery of the Weird Box,” Marcus asks, smiling as he rises to his feet, “or do you want to come back to bed?”

 “Bed,” she agrees, rising to follow him inside.  “Definitely.”

And suddenly, just like that, the box is forgotten.

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW in this chapter for brief mention of Marcus enduring physical abuse as a child.

_Cold._

That’s the first thing she notices, as the void of nothingness around her slowly begins to solidify into reality.

She’s so cold.

She hasn’t been cold in . . . longer than she can remember.

There was no such thing as temperature in the City of Light; or rather, everything was whatever temperature she wanted it to be.  The bath and the coffee always hot, the champagne always perfectly chilled.  If she wanted to bask naked in the sunshine, the sunshine was plentiful.  If she wanted to curl up in front of the fireplace with Marcus, it was frosty outside.  She never gave it a thought.

But now she’s shivering, icy little puffs of air whistling over her skin, and her whole body hurts, and the cacophony of sounds in the background are excruciating, and the light filtering in through her tightly-closed eyelids feels both too dull and too harsh at the same time, and everything feels different.

 _Take me back,_ she cries out in her mind.  _I want to go back._

But the void is receding, it’s too far away for her to reach, and someone who isn’t Marcus Kane – he smells different, feels different – is carrying her in hard strong arms through this loud, cold, chaotic place, and Abby doesn’t know where she is but she knows the City of Light is lost to her.

Then the strong arms set her down on a cold floor and a voice close to her ear murmurs, “I think she might be waking up.”

_Bellamy._

She knows him.  She remembers this voice.  Just as she remembers the voice that answers it.

“Abby, can you hear us?  Abby, you need to open your eyes.”

_Octavia._

_Bellamy and Octavia Blake._

She hasn’t thought about Bellamy and Octavia Blake from the moment Thelonious put that blue chip in her mouth.  Why wasn’t she supposed to think about them?

There’s something else, there’s something ALIE didn’t want her to remember, there’s a wall inside her mind that’s crumbling bit by bit, but slowly, it’s coming back to her in bits and flashes.  For a moment she thinks to herself, as the cold stones press into her back and warm hands touch her all over – feeling her forehead, checking her wrists for a pulse, pressing between her breasts to feel the rise and fall of her breathing – that these must be her children.  And that feels _almost_ right, but not quite.

“How’s her pulse?” comes another voice, from further away, and she knows this voice too. 

_Jackson._

But this is wrong.  This piece doesn’t fit.  Because Jackson was in the City of Light.  She remembers that much.  Jackson was with her, while Bellamy and Octavia were with –

“Clarke,” she whispers, her voice rusty from disuse, barely audible, but it’s enough.  It breaks the spell.

_Abby remembers._

“Clarke,” she says again, a rough dry croak – Abby hasn’t used her vocal cords in weeks, her body held by ALIE in a kind of self-imposed stasis – and she finds herself remembering, as she speaks, how words are formed in her mouth.  “Clarke.  Clarke.”

_“Mom!”_

“Clarke, slow down, you’ve just been through a – “

But Jackson’s voice trails off, unheeded, as a clatter from somewhere on the other side of the room and a choked-back sob from a voice Abby knows better than she knows her own finally push away the last of the fog, and she opens her eyes to see a halo of gold flying towards her as her daughter drops down to the ground and wraps desperate, trembling arms around Abby, unable to hold back her tears any longer.

“We couldn’t find you,” she whispers into Abby’s hair, holding her tightly, kissing her over and over.  “Mom, I was so scared.  We couldn’t find you.”

“Clarke,” says Abby over and over again.  It’s a word she hasn’t spoken in so long, it’s a word ALIE fought hard to take away from her, but now it’s the only thing Abby can say.  “Clarke.  Clarke.”

“You’re okay,” Clarke sniffles through her sobs, burying her face in her mother’s shoulder.  “We’re gonna be okay.”

They hold each other for a long, long time before Abby blinks back her tears enough to finally pull back and look around.

It takes her a long, long time to fit together the strange things she’s seeing.  Jackson standing beside what looks like a dead body, black-smudged plastic medical tubes protruding from its chest.  An IV port in Clarke’s arm.  A chipped tile floor she recognizes, though she can’t quite place where she is.  A sea of faces – the Blakes, John Murphy, Nate Miller – watching her with something in their faces like apprehension.  Like they’re not quite sure of her.

And then the last piece falls into place, and Abby’s afraid she’s going to be sick.

“You’re okay,” Clarke says again, reassuringly, seeing the shock of stunned panic hit Abby like a fist to the stomach.

_Polis._

_The tower._

_Marcus._

_The kiss._

_The nails._

_The cross._

“Even the dead can live forever in the City of Light,” Thelonious had said.  “Death, life, these words are meaningless now.”

She looks around for him, panicked, wild-eyed, her heart pounding in her throat like a martial drum.  _No, please, no.  Please, please, please._

“Easy,” says Jackson, catching her by the elbow as she pulls away from Clarke and struggles to her feet.  “Abby, maybe you should lie down.”

 “Mom,” Clarke starts to say, but Abby isn’t listening, she’s scanning the room full of faces, so many faces, none of them his, and she feels the full force of the realization hit her like a tidal wave:

If Marcus Kane died on that cross, _she will have killed him._

“Marcus,” she whispers, her voice hoarse and raw.  “Where’s Marcus?  What happened to Marcus?”  The words scrape out of her rusty throat, but they don’t understand her at first, and she takes their confused stares as assent.  “Where is he?”

“Mom, wait, Kane is – “ Clarke starts to say, rising to her feet, but she’s cut off by the violent slam of the door flying open and crashing into the wall.

“Where is she?” roars Marcus as he flies into the throne room, trailed by Pike and Indra.  He’s clearly weak and dizzy – Pike catches him twice as he stumbles – but he doesn’t stop until he sees her, and then his entire body collapses.  “Abby,” he whispers, his face contorted in an agonizing mask of sorrow and relief.  “Oh God, Abby, I thought you were dead.”  He pulls away from Pike’s grasp to move towards her, reaching out his hand.  “I thought you were dead,” he says again, and she reaches out her hand for his, tears streaming down her face.

Then she sees the blood.

Someone has tied rough, yellowing strips of fabric around his wrist as makeshift bandages, and they’re stained all over with massive swathes of rust-red.  

 _She_ did this.

She did this to him.

She pulls her hand away, sudden and sharp, afraid of herself, afraid to touch him, afraid that if her fingertips graze that injured wrist and he winces in pain, even a little, that it will shatter her completely.  She recoils from his touch and sinks back to the ground, her head buried in her arms, and a startled, confused Clarke strokes her mother’s hair as Abby dissolves into desperate, wracking sobs.

“He should have those looked at,” she dimly hears Pike say, and Jackson – whose instinct to take care of Abby is temporarily overtaken by the need for a doctor – says “I’ll take care of it.  There’s a med kit over here.  Kane, come with me.”

She doesn’t see Kane look down at her with something more closely resembling heartbreak than anyone else in the room has ever seen.  She doesn’t see Clarke look up at him helplessly, unsure what to do or say, or the sad, silent nod of acceptance he gives as he turns and follows Jackson to the other side of the room where Clarke left the emergency medical supplies.  She doesn’t see the way every pair of eyes in the room – Indra’s, Pike’s, Bellamy’s, Octavia’s – flits uncertainly from Abby to Marcus and back again, wondering what unspoken thing passed between them that will never be said out loud.

Wondering, with sinking hearts, who gave Marcus those wounds on his wrists, and fearing they probably already knew.

Wondering what happened in the City of Light, and why neither of them can look at each other.

Abby sees none of this.  She simply collapses, her face buried in her hands, as her daughter strokes her back and hair and tries to no avail to get her to stop crying.

Jackson will clean and bandage his wrists, but Jackson can’t heal the real wound.

She let herself forget about the real Marcus, back here in Polis with holes through his flesh, tortured on a cross.  He would only have given in to save her.  But she didn’t think about any of that, in that sunny apartment with its fresh strawberries and silk lingerie and rose-scented bathtub, with his hungry tongue between her legs, making her come over and over. 

She forgot about everything.

She stopped fighting.

She surrendered.

She let ALIE win, she gave her exactly what she wanted, she entirely ceased to resist, and Marcus Kane could have died.  _Everyone_ could have died. 

Abby doesn’t remember the tree or the tin box, so she doesn’t know how the City of Light was shut down.  She has no idea about the manual resets or the breach in the firewall.  She doesn’t remember the killswitch.  She doesn’t know any of what happened while she was locked, unconscious, in that cold tower room.

All she knows is that ALIE made her forget her daughter.

All she knows is that she wasn’t strong enough to fight back.

She looks up for a split second and her eyes meet Kane’s across the room as Jackson gently swabs out the angry red wound on his left wrist, and she suddenly can’t repress the image of herself, naked and sheened with sweat, moaning in ecstasy as he fucks her against the bedroom’s gold-upholstered wall.  She sees it like she’s watching from the other side of the room, his hard muscled ass contracting as he thrusts into her, his low animal grunts muffled by the soft flesh of her shoulder.  His wrists smooth and unmarked, not even a scar.

She turns away, and can’t look at him anymore.

* * *

 She does not want to talk about the City of Light.

Or hear about it, or even _think_ about it.

She gets a concise, matter-of-fact debriefing from Bellamy, who tells her about the Nightblood transfusion and ALIE’s army and everything that happened in Polis.  And she spends the whole of a long, tearful night curled up on Lexa’s couch with her arms around her daughter, stroking her hair and kissing her head and listening to the story of her daughter and the Commander. 

But she does not ask what happened in the City of Light, and Clarke does not tell her.

She doesn’t want to know.

It helps, a little, having something to _do._   She returns to something resembling a steady routine with Jackson, treating the dozens of wounded Grounders and Sky People, and carefully removing the now-dormant chips from them all one by one.  Though they don’t talk much, the silences between them are rich with words unspoken of all the things that have passed between them.  Like Jackson’s guilt and grief for his role, even unintentionally, in Jaha’s torture of Abby and Raven to coerce her into taking the chip.  His astonishment when Clarke used Raven’s electromagnetic pulse to free him from ALIE’s grip and asked for his help with the blood transfusion, his profound relief that there was something he could do to at least begin to make it up to Abby, by keeping Clarke safe inside the City of Light so she could save their people. 

And on Abby’s side, empathy and forgiveness for the things he did to her and an overwhelming gratitude that he had protected Clarke, intermingled with a desolate, hollow sadness that she hadn’t been capable of protecting her own daughter.

It’s so much easier to forgive Jackson than herself.

They spend a few days in Polis, treating the injured and burying the dead, before the first contingents of Sky People begin to return to Arkadia.

Clarke stays behind to help lead the slow, gradual process of rebuilding.  There is no Commander, there are no more Nightbloods, and Polis is in ruins.  Everyone is starting over.  They find a handful of ambassadors still living, who managed to survive Ontari’s brief brutal reign, but the only clan leaders in Polis are Roan, Indra . . . and the rightful leader of the Sky People, who bears the Commander’s mark on his skin.

So Marcus stays in Polis with Clarke, and Abby – who cannot even stay in the same room with him for longer than a few minutes, can’t bear the sound of his voice or the feeling of his gaze on her or the awful, awful sight of the bandages around his wrists – goes home.

* * *

 She rides back to Arkadia with Bellamy four days later.  There are three guards on rotating shifts to caravan the Sky People back home; Abby could have left a full day earlier if she’d been willing to drive back with Pike in the Rover, but she couldn’t quite face it.  Bellamy drives the cargo truck, which means his passengers are generally the sick and injured, those who need to travel lying down flat on stretchers.  They don’t talk much.  But Pike and David Miller take the Rovers, which means Abby would be trapped for hours and hours with half a dozen passengers in the back, most of whom only took the chip because she gave it to them. 

Given the choice, she’d rather have Bellamy – who is anything but chatty – and a truck full of sedated patients who sleep the whole drive home.

And besides, there’s something in the way Pike looks at her that she doesn’t quite like.  There’s a softness that makes her flush with unexpected mortification, like he sees more than he lets on.  She saw the same look on him once before, on another day she tries not to think about. ( _“I’m sorry, Abby. I know how much you care for Marcus.”_ )  

But Bellamy is good company for the mood she’s in because he doesn’t want to talk either, so the hours pass in silence.  It’s a relief.

Raven comes by Medical to see her that evening, and seeing her alive and well is the only bright glimmer of hope that manages to pierce through the dark fog around her.  They embrace for a long time, and there’s months of unspoken things in the silence between them – Raven’s regret at pushing her friend away for so long and her agonized guilt at Abby taking the chip to save her life; Abby’s horror at the way ALIE tortured Raven and overwhelming relief that she’s safe now; and some elusive, uncomfortable thing that hovers in the air, as though Raven knows something she isn’t saying.  (Bellamy has told Raven that Abby will not discuss anything that happened in the City of Light; the memory of forgetting everyone she loves in the real world is still too painful for her.  Raven wants to thank Abby for helping her open the gate into the Citadel, but she refrains, per Bellamy’s instructions.  She has no idea that Abby doesn’t remember any of it.  She has no idea that Abby thinks they haven’t spoken since she first took the chip.)

Days go by, then turn into weeks.

Bellamy comes home for good a few days after he drives Abby back, bringing the last truckload of Sky People with him.  Octavia and Pike return with him.  John Murphy came back a few days before, bringing the Grounder girl with him.  All their people are home now.

Except for two.

Marcus radios back every day with a report on the situation in Polis, but Abby can’t bear the sound of his voice.  It’s all tangled up in her mind, now, the screams of pain as the nails pierce his wrist and the soft murmur of his voice telling her their people need her to show them the way out of the dark and his wild panting groans as he comes hard inside her.  Every time she hears that warm, familiar voice, as dear to her by now as Clarke’s, she feels sick all over again.  She can’t stop thinking about the cross.

She puts Bellamy in charge of communication with Polis.  He gives her a long, penetrating look, but he nods and doesn’t ask questions.

Until she floats the idea, almost nonchalantly, that Kane will probably be needed in Polis for the foreseeable future, as leader of the thirteenth clan.

“We can’t move all of Arkadia to Polis, Abby,” says Bellamy, exasperated.

“I know.”

“Why are you trying to get rid of Kane?”

“I’m not trying to get rid of Kane.”

“Every day he asks how you are.”

“I’m fine.  Tell him I’m fine.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying.”

“Good.”

“But you’re _not,_ are you?” he asks pointedly, and Abby doesn’t know what to say to this.  “Clarke is worried about you,” he goes on, which softens her defenses as he knew it would.  “You and Kane, you were . . . close, before.  Now you’re not.”

“You didn’t take the chip,” she says to him, “so you don’t know what it was like.”

“No,” he agrees.  “I don’t.  But I know Jackson and I know Raven and I know Clarke.  They all came out of it pretty shaken up, but it passed.  You two . . .”  He shakes his head.  “I’m not prying,” he adds, “I’m just saying, if something happened in there that you need to talk about – “

“You really want to be my therapist, Bellamy?”

“Not even a little bit,” he says frankly, and it almost gets her to smile.  “I meant, talk to _him_.”

“He’s not here,” she says, a little lamely, knowing they both know that isn’t the real reason.

“He will be by sundown,” Bellamy tosses back at her, startling all the breath out of her lungs.  “They’re already on their way home.”  Abby is silent, frozen, her mind racing.  “My life’s a lot easier when Clarke isn’t worrying every ten seconds that her mom is about to have a breakdown,” he sighs.  “Just talk to Kane, would you?”

She doesn’t say anything as he turns to leave, she just watches him go, and stands frozen in place for a long time afterward, staring at the empty doorway.

She’s still standing there an hour later when she hears the Rover come over the hill.

Abby can’t hide from Marcus Kane’s wrists any longer, because he’s home.

She doesn’t know how to apologize to him.  She doesn’t know what to say.

It’s too much to ask for him to forgive her, too much to ask that he could possibly still feel towards her what he felt when he kissed her the day he left Arkadia.  But maybe, if she’s lucky, at least he’ll listen.  And maybe, in time, they’ll be able to look at each other again.

She hopes.

So she lets herself into his bedroom, and sits down on his couch to wait.

* * *

He doesn’t see her at first. 

He doesn’t make it back to his room until after sunset, and she turned on one of the lamps while she waited, the one on the table beside his bed.  But she’s still sitting in shadow.

She watches him tug off his jacket, hang it neatly on the hook, set his pack down in the corner to deal with later, and run his hands over his face and through his hair with a weary sigh.  He looks so tired, she thinks.  She wants so badly to stand up and go over to him and take him in her arms, cradling him close, stroking his hair, letting him sink into her and rest.  And she very nearly does it, until she’s stopped short by the thing that happens next.

He lifts his left hand, turns it over, and traces his fingers over the dark, ugly scar on his wrist.

Abby feels sick.

He’s half in shadow and half in light, and she watches as he examines his wrists in the dim light, first one and then the other.  They’re healing well, at least; Jackson came home when Bellamy did, so it was Clarke who tended to Marcus over the past several weeks, cleaning his wounds and changing the bandages twice a day until he was healed enough to remove them.  But the scars are deep.  They will be with him for the rest of his life.

Because of her.

He stands there for a long, long time, his head bent like the weight of the world is on his shoulders, tracing the outline of the scar with his fingertips, the warm glow of his bedside lamp burnishing his dark hair with soft amber lights and casting his face in shadow, and finally she can’t hold back anymore.

“Marcus,” she whispers, and his whole body goes still.  “If you never wanted to see me again,” she goes on, fighting hard to keep her voice from quavering as she moves a little closer, into the light, “I would understand.”

When he turns to look at her for the first time, she can see the bright glitter of tears spring suddenly to his eyes.  He takes a hesitant step towards her, as though he’s lost in unknown territory, as though he’s forgotten that this is his bedroom and these are his things and she’s the one intruding.

“Abby,” he says, his tone impossible to read, and she braces herself for the inevitable.

_Abby, get out of my room._

_Abby, look what you did to me._

_Abby, how could you?_

_Abby, the sight of you makes me sick._

She steels herself.  Whatever comes next, she has earned it.  She deserves this.

But, “Abby, I’m so sorry,” he says, his voice softer this time, heavy with sadness.  “I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry.”

She freezes, uncertain how to respond to this.  “Marcus, why are _you_ apologizing to _me_?” she asks, baffled.  “When _I’m_ the reason – “  She stops, unable to go on, but he sees the way she can’t look down at his hands and understands immediately.

“That wasn’t you,” he says simply.  “I know you, Abby.  I know you better than anyone.  Abby Griffin would never do any of those things.  But ALIE would.”

“Marcus, your wrists – “

“My wrists will heal,” he cuts her off firmly.  “It wasn’t you, Abby.  I’m not angry.  I don’t blame you.”  She collapses a little, in relief, though it’s brought to an abrupt halt by the baffling thing he says to her next. “How could I possibly hold that against you,” he asks her in a strangely broken voice, “when what I did to you was so much worse?”

“You didn’t do anything,” she reassures him, moving in close with a comforting hand outstretched.  But he shakes his head and moves away from her touch.  He can’t look at her.

“I don’t think we should,” he begins, then stops, unsure how to go on.

“Marcus,” she says gently, and waits quietly for him to collect himself.  It takes a long time before he ventures to look up at her again.  “Marcus, will you please just _talk_ to me?”

He’s silent for a moment, moving a little away from her and looking anywhere but into her eyes.  She watches him, and waits for him to speak.

“When I went into the City of Light,” he begins finally, his voice so low she can hardly hear him, “I opened my eyes and I was in this place . . . it was like nothing you’ve ever seen before, Abby, it was so beautiful –“

“Marcus, I was – “

“Please,” he interrupts her urgently, “please, I have to say this.  Let me just say this.”

“But Marcus, I – “

“You were _there,_ Abby.  ALIE brought me to this place and I walked in the door and I saw you, or, I don’t know, some illusion of you, some vision that she sent to trick me, to keep me from remembering the real Abby Griffin that I . . . that I . . . well, the _real_ you.  And we, I, this illusion of Abby, she felt so real, and I . . . I felt things – “  

He stops, shaken by memories, and Abby once more tries to reach out for him but he pulls away.  “Don’t be kind to me,” he says harshly, “I don’t deserve it.”

“Marcus, what on earth – “

“I know I have no right to feel guilty,” he murmurs.  “To feel that I was . . . unfaithful.  You and I aren’t – we don’t – there’s nothing to – but I _do,_ Abby, I feel it, even though it was an illusion, even though I know it was ALIE and not you, still, there was a part of me that wanted to believe . . .”

He stops abruptly, overcome.  He can’t go on.  But Abby has heard enough to understand, and she reaches out to take his hands in hers.  She holds them firmly, too tight for him to pull away, and strokes his rough skin with her thumbs as he looks down at her, his warm brown eyes aching with sorrow.

When she speaks, even though she’s smiling, there are tears in her eyes too.  “You weren’t unfaithful,” she tells him, her voice gentle, but he shakes his head.

“You don’t know,” he insists, “you don’t know . . . the things I did . . . the things I did with her . . . I didn’t know it was ALIE then, I thought it was _you_ , I thought you would remember, that you were choosing it too – if I had known I would _never_ – you have to believe me, Abby, I would _never,_ not with anyone else – but I didn’t know, and now . . .”  He stops, swallows hard.  “The things I did,” he whispers.  “If you knew, you would never be able to bear my touch ever again.  You wouldn’t be able to look at me.”

“Stop,” she says firmly, resting her hand on his cheek.  “Marcus, stop.  Listen to me.  You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Abby, you don’t have to – “

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she presses on, cutting him off before he can finish, “because that was _me_.”

He stares at her.  “I don’t understand.”

“We were both there, Marcus,” she explains.  “We _both_ did those things.  We _both_ wanted to.”  His eyes are still blank and uncomprehending.  “You’re not the only one who misses that bathtub,” she teases him a little, trying to break the tension, trying to make him smile, but his eyes widen in something like panic and he pulls his hands away as though her touch burns his skin.

“You were . . . that was – “

“Yes.”

“And we . . .”  He swallows hard.  “You and I, we – “

“Yes.”

“Abby,” he breathes, stunned, his eyes dark and wild on hers, and she can see his thoughts as clearly as though they’re written on his face.  “Does that mean,” he begins tentatively, then stops, as though afraid to say the thing out loud in case he’s wrong.

“I remember it too,” she murmurs.  “It was really me, Marcus.  Just like it was really you.  ALIE manipulated us, she did things, she made it . . . different” (Marcus blushes at this and can’t look at her) – “but it was really us.”

“But how – “

“Marcus, I can’t stop thinking about it,” she cuts him off before he can protest again.  “Sometimes I can even feel it.”

“Abby – “

“I want to do those things again,” she whispers recklessly, the words tumbling out of her mouth in a rush before she can stop herself, and the whole world stops spinning as they both realize what she’s said.

Marcus swallows again.  He starts to say something, but no words come out.  He’s frozen in place, stunned into stillness as he realizes what she’s asking him.

“It wasn’t real before,” she says, moving in close to him again, and this time he doesn’t flinch.   “It felt so good, Marcus, you made me feel so good, but it wasn’t _real._  It wasn’t your real body and my real body.  We were just lines of code.  And ALIE was trying to distract us, trying to keep us from remembering who we really were.  She made us forget our real lives, the people we loved.  Clarke.  Jake and Vera.  Our people.  I don’t want it the way it was, Marcus, I don’t want to go back to that place, go back to that illusion.”  She rests the palms of her hands lightly and gently against his chest, looking up at him as he stares down at her, his warm brown eyes impossible to read.  “But I did want to do those things with you,” she whispers.  “Every single one of them.  I wanted them then and I want them now.”

He closes his eyes as her hands slide up his chest, graze his neck, and press softly against his strong jaw, cupping his cheek and drawing his face down to hers.

“Abby . . .”

“I’ll say it out loud,” she murmurs, “if I have to.  But I’m not quite as brave out here.”

“Say it,” he breathes softly, not opening his eyes.  “I have to hear you say it, Abby, I’m too afraid – I don’t want to be wrong about this.”

“I’m in love with you, Marcus,” she says simply, and his eyes fly open, startled.  This wasn’t what he expected.  “I’m in love with you,” she says again, “and I want you.   _All_ of you.  Your heart and your body.  I can’t – “ She stops short, and it’s her turn to blush a little and look away as Marcus’ hands alight on her hips, drawing their bodies closer together.  “I can’t say it the way I said it before,” she admits a little sheepishly.  “I wish I – but I’m just not – I don’t know if I’m brave enough to ask for what I want the way I could then,” she finally admits, “but everything I want is the same.”

“In all my life,” he whispers, “I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you.  I didn’t even know that I could.”  He lifts a hand to brush a loose tendril of hair away from her face.  “I thought it was just me,” he confesses.  “I thought I was the only who felt the things I feel.  I thought, after the things I’ve done, how could she ever –“

“I love you,” she says again, bolder this time, because he needs to believe it, and as she tugs his head down to meet hers, the unshed tears begin to spill down both their cheeks.  “I love you, Marcus.  I love you.  I love you.”

When he kisses her this time, it’s nothing like before.  It’s not rushed and desperate like their first kiss, before he climbed through the wall panel to flee Arkadia with no way of knowing whether he would ever see her again.  And it’s not ravenous and wild like their kisses in the City of Light, slamming each other up against walls so hard they knocked the pictures sideways.  This is the first kiss where they meet each other on even ground, with all the time in the world.  It’s slow and unhurried and tender, new and familiar at the same time, and as Abby’s mouth parts beneath his own Marcus feels the two halves of him join together, like a key clicking home inside a lock.   He’d had no idea they were two pieces of the same whole, that the panic he feels when she walks into danger and the way her soft breathy cries send shivers down his skin are the same thing.  

All of it is the same thing.

“I didn’t know,” he whispers.  “God help me, Abby, until I saw you in the City of Light, I didn’t know.”

“Neither did I,” she murmurs, brushing soft lips along his jawline and down his neck, smiling as she feels him breathe in sharply.  “But we know now.”

“Yes, we do.”

“So what are we going to do about it?”  She kisses the hollow of his neck, tugging down the collar of his t-shirt so she can graze her lips lightly over his skin.

“Abby – “

“Are you going to make me say it?” she sighs, exasperated.  “Fine.  Then I’ll say it.”  She steps back from him suddenly and pulls her shirt off over her head.  “Take me to bed, Marcus,” she says firmly, but he can’t even move.

This bra is gray and patched and threadbare, with no satin or bows and just the faintest ghost of what might once, a long time ago, have been lace.  There’s nothing glamorous about it, nothing calculated from ALIE’s data to allure him.  It’s just _Abby_ , hands on hips, eyes piercing into him, warm and vibrant and alive, those perfect breasts suddenly real and right there in front of him.

And then he says the last thing she ever would have expected.

“You have _freckles_ ,” he exclaims delightedly, and then steps in close to kiss her.

She bursts out laughing.  She can’t help herself.  In forty-two years she has never seen Marcus Kane this _alive._   He kisses her mouth, his smile of giddy delight melting into hers, then brushes his lips across her jaw, her cheek, her throat, her shoulders, before pulling back to trace his fingers all over her skin, grazing the constellations of soft freckles scattered along her arms and chest.  “You didn’t have these before,” he informs her, his fingertips dusting over her shoulderblades, pressing his lips on each freckle one by one.  “In the City of Light.”

“I didn’t?”

“Definitely not.  I would have remembered.” He presses a kiss against the hollow where her shoulderblades draw together as his hands skim down her back, halting abruptly at the faded round scars at the base of her spine.  The air around them changes imperceptibly, and Marcus’ hand goes still, as though he’s frozen in place again.

“I probably didn’t have those either,” she murmurs softly.

“No,” he says.  “You didn’t.”

“And you didn’t have these,” she adds, turning around and taking his hand in hers, turning it palm-up so the neat round scar on his wrist is plainly visible.

“No,” he says in a low voice.  “No, I didn’t.”

They stand there like that for a long time.  She holds his right hand in both of hers, looking down at the mark on his wrist, as his other hand slips around her bare waist to graze light fingertips over the scars on her back.  After a long, still moment, Abby lifts his hand to her mouth and kisses his scar, gently, tenderly, over and over again.

“Abby,” he breathes, moving in closer, resting his head against hers.

“I’m glad,” she tells him, lips brushing lightly over his skin.  “I’m glad that we have our scars back.  I don’t think we would know who we were without them.  They’re part of us now.”  She kisses his wrist again.  “I’m part of you now,” she whispers.  “And you’re part of me.”

He smiles down at her, eyes shining with emotion.  “That’s what I was thinking about,” he murmurs.  “Just now, when I came home.  When you were watching me looking at the scars.  You thought I was angry at you.  You thought I was thinking about the pain, but I wasn’t.”  He strokes light fingers up and down her back, grazing the now-fading marks of Major Byrne’s shocklash.  “This scar reminds me of one of the worst things I’ve ever done,” he murmurs, “but it also reminds me of the moment I realized how desperately I need you.  The moment I realized you were my conscience.  My heart.  The moment I knew that I couldn’t do this alone.  That I couldn’t be whole without you.”  He pulls his hand back and turns over both of his wrists in front of her.  “And these,” he says to her gently, “these aren’t scars that you gave to me, Abby.  They’re scars that ALIE gave to both of us.  But they also mark the moment that I first realized I was in love with you.”  She looks up at him in astonishment, heart too full for words.  He smiles sadly down at her, eyes filling with tears.  “All I could think about, there on that cross,” he whispers, “was how I failed you.  I left you at Arkadia unprotected.  I was so focused on Pike that I didn’t see that Jaha was the real threat all along.  I got myself arrested and then I left, and you were all alone.  There was no one left here to protect you.  And the moment I realized you had taken the chip, I knew you must have done it to save someone else.  If I had been here with you, with Raven, everything would have been different.  And the only thing left I could do for you, in the end, was to take the chip, and hope that Jaha would keep his promise and that you would be safe.”  He kisses her forehead.  “You didn’t give me these scars,” he tells her again.  “ALIE gave them to both of us. You risked your life to save Raven’s, because that’s who you are.  So every time I look at these scars, I think about the woman I love, and how brave she is.”

Abby can’t speak.  She can’t even look at him.  She simply melts into his chest, closing her eyes and resting her forehead against the soft cotton of his shirt, her arms wrapping around his waist to hold him close.  “You’re not the one who hurt me,” he murmurs into her hair.  “You’re the one who saves me.  So many times.  Over and over and over again.  In more ways than you know.”  He kisses her hair, his hands warm on her back as his fingers trace the ridges of her spine.  “I didn’t know I could love anyone like this,” he says softly.  “I had no idea it was possible.”

“Marcus,” she murmurs, stepping back out of his arms just enough to look up at him and meet his eyes, and he swallows hard when he sees her hands drop to the waist of her jeans.  Each soft _snap, snap,_ snap as she carefully unfastens them makes him shudder as she steps out of her boots, fumblingly toes off her socks, and then draws the thick fabric of her jeans down over her hips. 

The cotton shorts aren’t any more glamorous or elegant than the faded bra, but he’s dumbstruck all the same by the expanse of bared skin he’s seeing for the first time.  She tugs the elastic out of her hair, letting it fall loose over her shoulders, and then she just stands there in front of him, feeling his eyes rake deliciously over her, letting herself be _seen_ for the first time in longer than she can remember.

It wasn’t like this in the City of Light, because that wasn’t her real body.  That was a shell built by ALIE, freed of any perceived imperfections or weaknesses, from freckles to fatigue to the need for food.  But this is her, the real Abby Griffin, with shocklash marks on her back and the pale ghost of pregnancy stretch marks on her belly and a long thin scar on her knee from an accident with scissors when she was ten years old.  The real Abby Griffin has threads of gray in her hair and breasts with the heavy softness of a woman who has nursed a child.  The story of her whole life is in this body, and she’s letting Marcus Kane see it for the very first time, and she feels as though she ought to be shy but she isn’t at all, because he’s looking at her like she’s made of the sun.

She reaches up after a moment and unhooks her bra, letting it fall to the floor, and this is the thing that finally makes her realize what she’s doing – what _they’re_ doing – and the shyness hits her all at once.  So she busies herself, a little awkwardly, with gathering up her clothes, which conveniently lets her turn away from him for a moment and buy herself a moment to adjust to the fact that Marcus Kane is looking at every inch of her naked forty-two-year-old body.  She tucks her socks into her boots, carefully folds her bra and underwear and sets them on top of the tidy squares of her shirt and jeans, and then turns back around to see him watching her with something like patient, affectionate puzzlement. 

“Now you,” she says, voice coming out slightly demanding, and the ghost of a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth.

“I usually just leave everything in a pile at the foot of the bed,” he says mildly, and she blushes a little as though he’s teasing her.  But he obediently tugs off his t-shirt, folding it carefully and setting it next to hers, then stepping out of his own boots and socks, which he neatly lines up beside her own.  She can’t quite bring herself to watch as he unfastens his jeans, busying herself with unnecessarily smoothing a wrinkle out of his folded shirt, though the sound of the zipper does something inexplicable to her, making her feel cold and hot all at once.  He folds his jeans carefully and properly, lining them up at the cuff so the seams fall into place, and it’s such a small stupid thing but she feels herself falling for him all over again anyway. 

Then, “Okay,” he says in an uncharacteristically timid voice, and she turns around.  Then, valiantly attempting to hide the trembling of his hands, he tugs the black cotton shorts off his hips and lets them fall and stands there bared before her.

Everything is different and the same at once, familiar and new, and she can’t tear her eyes away.  The soft dark hair on his chest is thicker, and his skin is bruised and scarred in places where the other Marcus was smooth. And she had assumed, somehow, that ALIE’s manipulation of their desires extended to their bodies as well, but is shocked to realize – as her eyes dart lower to the massive, heavy cock between his thighs – that there’s at least one thing ALIE didn’t exaggerate at all.

A thousand contradictory thoughts dart across her face, one after another, as a fraction of a smile tugs at the corner of her mouth before she ducks her head, blushing, to look away.  It’s a bewitching combination of desire and timidity, tinged with a hint of amused embarrassment at how clearly he must be able to read what she’s thinking.  “You’re staring,” he observes mildly, and the shy smile returns but she still can’t quite meet his eyes.  She’s gazing instead, with an expression that shows her a bit surprised at her own boldness, at the swelling bulk between his thighs, which she can’t tear her eyes away from.  “You’ve seen me naked before,” he reminds her, but she shakes her head.

“I saw what ALIE wanted me to see,” she murmurs.  “I didn’t see _you.”_

“Abby . . . “

“Let me see you, Marcus,” she says softly, and she does look up at him then, her eyes warm and earnest on his own as she steps in closer.  He swallows hard, nods, closes his eyes, but he can feel her gaze on his skin like a physical thing.  She traces soft fingertips down his chest, across his shoulders, down his arms.  There’s a heavy diagonal scar running across both his calves that she recognizes as the wound she felt, but couldn’t see, when the rubble collapsed on him after the bombs hit Tondc.  She steps in close, trailing her fingertips along his shoulders to his broad, strong back, where she spots a long, thin telltale stripe just above his hips – faded with age but still immediately recognizable to Abby’s keen doctor’s eye.  The kind of scar left by years of an identical wound, repeated over and over, with surgical precision in the exact same place.  His _own_ doctor should have spotted this, she thinks with a white-hot burst of protective anger.  She wonders what lies that little boy told to his doctor, or to his friends, when they asked about it.  She remembers the way her parents looked at each other uncomfortably when Thelonious Jaha’s mother asked if they would be attending Hector Kane’s funeral, and how nobody – not even Marcus or Vera – seemed very sad when he died.  She thinks about the Marcus Kane she knew as a child, that pale, withdrawn boy with a fervent devotion to following the rules.  And she thinks about the Marcus Kane who insisted on having her shocklashed, to teach everyone a lesson, and then ten minutes later handed her the Chancellor pin and vanished into the woods on a suicide mission to find her daughter.  And she thinks about the Marcus Kane who she watches lose his mind with worry over Bellamy and Octavia Blake every time they walk into danger.  And she realizes with a shock, for the very first time, the sheer, staggering magnitude of what that quiet, rigid boy he used to be finally overcame, in order to become a better father than the one he’d been given himself.

She touches the scar lightly, with the tip of one finger, and he flinches but doesn’t pull away.  When he turns to look down at her, he sees comprehension in her eyes, and the faint little nod of confirmation he gives her in return tells her everything she needs to know.  “You’re brave too,” she murmurs, pressing kisses into his shoulder.  “I don’t think you think you are.  But I see it, even if you can’t.”  He closes his eyes, his breath coming harder and faster, and she can hear his heart pounding in his chest.  This is the most naked he has ever been in all his life.  “I see you,” she whispers, skimming her fingers lightly down his chest to graze his hips and thighs.  “You’re so beautiful, Marcus.  You’re so _real.”_

“So are you,” he whispers back.  “I’ve never wanted anyone like this.”

“I’m right here,” she says.  “I’m right here, Marcus.  I’m not going anywhere.”

“Abby – “

“Take me to bed,” she says again, and this time he does.

He holds out his hand and she takes it, letting him lead her over to the bed and waiting patiently as he pulls back the covers.  There’s something almost heartbreaking in the way he smooths out the sheets, fluffs the lone pillow, tries to make it nice for her.  She can feel him wishing he had rose petals and silk cushions to offer her, she can feel him already afraid what he has to give her won’t be enough.  Abby would rather be in this dark little room with the real Marcus – the one covered in scars and bruises, the one whose heart has been battered and dented over forty-four years of difficult living – than with an artificially flawless illusion of him in the most beautiful apartment in the world.  She’s exactly where she wants to be.  But she doesn’t quite have the words to explain this to him, so instead she just tugs at his hand until he turns to her and she pulls his head down to hers for a warm, hungry, eager kiss. 

He smiles as she pulls away, and he doesn’t look ashamed of his room after that.

She climbs into the bed, pulling the covers around her, and moves aside to make room for him beside her.  “I’m not,” she starts to say, then blushes.  “I mean I can’t – not right away, like before, I can’t just – “

“I know,” he says gently.  “Lie back.” 

He lowers her down against the pillow and settles in to curl up beside her, brushing a stray tendril of hair out of her face with a tenderness that makes her ache.  He traces a line down her body with his fingertip, starting at the hollow of her throat, grazing her collarbone and between the creamy swell of her breasts, along the soft skin of her belly.  He’s fascinated by her stretch marks, which are new to him, and the C-section scar on her abdomen; he lingers there for awhile, his hands tracing the marks of her daughter on her body, and there’s something so tender in his touch – something that’s so clearly tangled up in his mind with the way he loves Clarke, too – that she feels tears spring unexpectedly to her eyes. 

He kisses her mouth as his hand drifts lower and lower until it finally alights on the threadbare black cotton between her thighs.  “Is it okay if I,” he starts to ask, then laughs as she cuts him off with an eager nod.  She helps him tug off the fabric and smiles as he folds it and sets it carefully on the floor, a far cry from Marcus in the City of Light, who ripped her clothes off in his haste to get to her. 

Once she’s bared in front of him, though, he can’t stop staring, can’t tear his eyes away from the rosy, shiny softness of her flesh, the pink pearl of her clit, the silken hair he reaches out to stroke lightly, tentatively, like he's gentling a wild animal.  She inhales deeply at the first sensation of his fingers against her delicate skin, but when he looks up to check on her she’s smiling, her eyes a little dazed but deeply happy.  So he settles in beside her, one hand stroking her hair and one between her thighs, and he brushes her lips softly with his own as he begins.

She’s wet already, a little, and it delights him immensely.  ALIE controlled this in the City of Light, after all, ALIE facilitated the joining of their bodies with no preparation or effort.  But this is different.  This is real and it means Abby doesn’t just love him, she _wants_ him.  It means her body knows what her heart knows, and as his fingers trace idle shapes through the soft damp silken folds of her cunt, he smiles at her.  She relaxes beneath his hand almost immediately, closing her eyes and sinking back against the mattress, sighing with pleasure at his delicate, gentle touch.  _“Oh,”_ she whispers as his fingertip finds her clit and begins to stroke it ever so lightly. 

“Right here?” he asks.  “This is okay?”

“That’s really good, right there,” she sighs.  “I really like that.”

“More?”

“Yes, please.”

So he presses down a little harder on her clit, rubbing his fingertip in tight little circles and feeling a rush of wetness beginning to warm his skin.  Abby’s hips rise up a little bit towards him as she wriggles to capture more, so he presses down harder still to please her.

“Can I make you come like this?” he asks her, curiosity temporarily overcoming shyness, and she giggles a little.

“You’re getting close,” she informs him, a mischievous sparkle in her voice, but he shakes his head.

“No, I didn’t mean that,” he explains with a low chuckle.  “I know I _can_ – I mean I know _you_ can, this way.  I just didn’t know, if I did, if you needed to, afterwards – I mean I don’t know how long it takes, after – “

“Fortunately for you, if what you’re asking is, do I need half an hour to recover in between, no, I don’t.  Most women can go again right away.  In fact,” she adds, “if you make me come this way, I’ll definitely be ready enough afterwards for – “

But she can’t say it.  The Abby she was in the City of Light would simply order him to make her come with his hand to make her wet enough for his huge, hard cock to fuck her.  She’s thinking it, they’re _both_ thinking it, but the thought of the way it was before makes them both shivery and shy.  But he knows what she means, so he keeps going, the gentle pressure of his fingers stirring a swirl of warmth inside her.

“I like it like this,” she murmurs up at him as he drops fluttering light kisses all over her shoulders and neck. 

“Are you close?”

“I’m getting there.”

“Can I . . . “  He swallows hard.  “Can I – kiss you?” he asks uncertainly.  “Or is that too much?”

“You’ve _been_ kissing me,” she almost says, but stops herself when she realizes what he means. 

He can’t say the words like he did before, but he knows exactly what he wants, and she wants it too.

“Yes,” she whispers urgently.  “Please.  Please.  I want you to.”

So he does.

His lips on the warm, wet pearl of her clit are impossibly soft, the rough bristle of beard against delicate skin making her tremble as he nuzzles deeply into her.  “Oh, Marcus,” she sighs his name in a long, shaky exhale, her hands coming up to caress his silky hair as the flat of his tongue glides up her center and his lips close around her clit and then all conscious thought leaves her body.  She becomes nothing except a maelstrom of sensations – his tongue, lips, teeth, beard, breath, his licking and suckling and kissing and sighing and devouring, his softness and eagerness and affection.  She can’t tell where one feeling ends and another begins.  She sinks down, down, down, it's like being submerged underwater, the way the waves of warmth swallow her up completely until there's nothing left in the whole world but the place where his hot soft wetness meets hers, and the room starts spinning as he grows bolder, more daring, as he begins to relax into it and his shyness dissolves away.  There's almost a little bit of that other Marcus in the way he moans with pleasure as the warm taste of her melts over him. 

"You taste different," he suddenly murmurs in surprised delight, pulling away to look up at her, and she loves him so much in that moment - hair disheveled, eyes wide and a little dazed, her wetness shimmering on his lips in a way that makes her shiver, the low hum of his voice so dear to her that she feels her whole body respond to it - that she feels inexplicably like bursting into tears.  Her heart is too full to speak, but she runs her hands through his soft dark hair, stroking, caressing, smiling as he closes his eyes against the pleasure of her touch.  "I don't know what's different," he says, "I can't describe it.  But now you taste like . . . _you."_

And she _does_ tear up at this, just a little, she can't help it, because the Abby Griffin who watched the cold silent void of space pull the love of her life out that airlock door to his death never thought anyone would ever look at her this way again.  But she can feel Marcus Kane's love for her like a physical thing that lives in every cell of her body.  It feels so impossible for them to be here, and yet here they are.

"Don't cry," he exclaims, suddenly startled, afraid he's done something wrong, scrambling up to the head of the bed to take her in his arms and stroke her hair.  "Abby.  Abby, what's wrong?  Please don't cry, I won't - if you don't want me to - if this is too much -"

"It's not that," she whispers, her hands caressing his cheeks, his jaw, her fingers soft on his skin.  "It's not that.  I just . . . "  She stops, can't find the words, and kisses him instead, savoring the way his mouth instantly parts beneath hers to draw her in.  "I didn't think I'd ever find this again," she says softly as his lips trail down her neck, and he freezes in place, unable to move, unable to look at her.

There was a story Marcus Kane told himself, beginning from the first moment he realized that some part of his heart belonged to Abby Griffin and he would never get it back.  A story about how he would always come in second to Jake.  Jake, who was her husband for two decades.  Jake, whose blonde hair and blue eyes live on in the daughter they bore and raised together.  Jake, whose ring never left the chain around her neck.  But what he sees now, when he looks into her eyes – the thing she’s been desperately trying to tell him – is that it isn’t like that at all.

There is no first or second place.  There’s just love, if you're lucky enough to find it, and everything else is just the holding on.

"Abby," he whispers, but there's nothing else to say. 

She kisses him again, tender and warm and overcome with affection, but the other thing is slipping back inside the kiss too, hot and sharp and urgent.  She can feel how hard he is where his body presses up against hers and his tongue has roused her to such an aching readiness that she thinks she might burst. 

"Abby, can I - can we -"

She nods breathlessly, and he swallows hard as he leans down to rest his forehead against hers, closing his eyes to breathe her in.  The air changes around them, pulsing with anticipation, drawing them in, and he shifts his weight over her body, bracing himself on his knees and forearms to hold himself above her and look down into her eyes.

“I don’t think I can – ” she starts to say, shyly, then looks away as a blush sweeps over her face.  “Not the way I could – before.  I mean, not at first.”

“I don’t think I can either,” he admits frankly, “that Marcus had the stamina of a teenager.”  Abby laughs and looks back up at him, the tension eased.

“Why does it feel like the first time?” she wonders, and he smiles.

“Because it _is_ the first time,” he tells her.  “It won’t be like it was because this time it’s just you and me.  No ALIE.  No one rewriting code to make our bodies do things.  Just us.”  He strokes her hair out of her face.

“That’s what I want,” she murmurs, her fingertips caressing his temple.  “I just want you.”

“I want you, too,” he says, and kisses her lightly, a whisper-light brush against her lips that makes her shiver.  “We’ll start slow,” he promises her.  “Let’s just . . . get used to each other.”

She nods, a little breathlessly, and he feels her arms tighten around his back.  “I’m ready,” she says softly, so he takes a deep breath, gripping his heavy, hard cock in his hand, and guides it slowly, slowly inside her.

She gasps sharply, her fingers digging into his skin, so he stops for a moment, skimming his fingers gently down the slope of her hips and thighs and pelvic bone to soothe and relax her.  She spent twenty years married to a big, powerful man and could take Jake’s cock easily and comfortably, but Marcus is bigger and everything is new and she feels him push and stretch inside her with a dizzying, intoxicating pressure.  He holds still inside her, afraid she’s uncomfortable, but she shakes her head.  “No, it’s good,” she whispers, “it’s so good, I just . . . I couldn’t feel it like this, before.  I couldn’t feel you like this.”  He raises an eyebrow.  “It’s like some things were turned up and some things were turned down,” she explains.  “So I always . . . you always made me – and it was – “  He nods to say he knows what she means, touched by this surprising shyness.  “But I couldn’t feel you inside me like this,” she whispers, the awe and wonder in her voice making him shiver.  “It’s you.  You’re _real._  You’re inside me.”

“Abby,” he murmurs, because it’s all he can say, and she smiles up at him.

“More,” she whispers.

He slides in another few inches, his cock now buried a little over halfway inside her, and he can feel her contract in startled pleasure around him.  “Oh,” she breathes, eyes wide.   _“Oh.”_

“Are you – “

“Just stay here for a minute,” she whispers.  “Just let me feel you, right here.”

“I like the way you feel too,” he says, and she beams up at him with undisguised delight.

“Am I different too?”

He nods.  “It was the same for me,” he tells her.  “Some things sharper and some things more . . . numb.  And because you were always – ready, right away, so I could always, I could just – “

“All the way.”

“Yes.  So I didn’t ever feel the way it felt, to just – “  He stops, and she laughs a little.

“It’s funny,” she confesses, “when I think of the way we talked to each other in the City of Light – the things we said – it’s funny that we’re having such a hard time now just saying the words out loud.”

He smiles, stroking a loose lock of hair away from her face.  “We called each other ‘baby’ a lot,” he observes dryly.  “I don’t know that I could pull that off in real life.”

“Oh, we said a lot dirtier things than _that.”_

He chuckles a little, conceding the point, and ducks his head a little shyly.  “I didn’t know I was the kind of person who could . . . who could _want_ like that,” he murmurs. “I didn’t know I had that inside of me.”

“That part didn’t go away,” she says in a low voice.  “The wanting.  It must have been real, even in that place, because it feels the same now.”  He shifts his weight, pushing in deeper, and a soft gasp tumbles out of her at the sensation. “More,” she pleads, pulling him close to her, tangling her fingertips in the soft thick hair at the back of his neck.  “I’m ready, Marcus, I want more.”

He nods, inhales deeply, his forehead so close to hers they’re nearly touching, and then with a low, desperate moan, he slides further and further inside. “Oh,” he gasps as he feels the soft brush of her damp hair against the sensitive mounds at the base of his cock and realizes he’s all the way inside her.  “Oh, Abby.”

“Marcus,” she moans, her hands clutching wildly at his back.  “ _Oh._   Oh, Marcus.”  He leans down to rest his head against her shoulder, overwhelmed by a pleasure so fierce it feels like joy, and for a long moment they don’t move.  She just cradles him there, holding him close, kissing his hair as her body softens and loosens and relaxes around him, holding him deep inside her.  “Stay here with me,” she murmurs, “just for a minute.  Stay here with me.”

“You feel so good,” he chokes out through heaving, panting gasps, his whole body alive with sensation.  “Abby.  You’re so – “

But he can't speak.  He rests his head against her shoulder, breath coming hard and fast, holding himself still inside her, pressing his mouth against the soft flesh of her neck.  She can feel him throb inside her, tantalizing and heavy and full, and her whole body has become one single desperate ache.

"Please," she whispers, and he looks up at her suddenly with an impish smile on his face.

"Please _what_?" he asks, his eyebrow raised, and she bites her lip in annoyance.

"You know."

"Maybe I don't."

"You're not - you're holding still, you're not - I want you to -"

"You said it before.  In the City of Light.  Dozens of times.  Hundreds."

"That wasn't me, that was ALIE."

"It was _partly_ you."

"Marcus -"

"I want to hear you say it," he teases, and she can see that he's desperate too, she can hear in his voice how hard he's working to keep himself under control, but he seems to be winning this battle of wills because she's half-faint with desire and he knows it.

"I'm not going to say it."

"Then I guess we're just going to sit here."

"Marcus!"

"Abby!"

"I can't," she protests, "I don't talk like that, I've _never_ \- it's _embarrassing_ , to think of anyone ever finding out - ever knowing - the way we . . . the things we did . . ."

"Nobody does know," he tells her, with all the calm reassurance of a man with absolutely no idea what Raven Reyes accidentally walked in on.  "It's just for you and me."  He kisses her mouth, soft and hot and pleading.  "What if in here, where it's just us," he murmurs, "with no ALIE inside our minds, we were brave enough to ask each other for all the things we want?"  He sees her wavering and kisses her again.  "Ask me for what you want," he says softly.  "Please, please, I want so badly to hear you say it."

 _“Fine,”_ she huffs, her frustration palpable, and he wants to laugh in spite of himself.  There’s a long moment where he watches her steel herself, fighting back a blush, taking a deep breath.  Then, "I want you to fuck me," she says in a small voice, words tumbling out in a rush, surprising her even more than him, and his whole face lights up in a beaming smile.

"Again," he whispers happily, nuzzling into her neck, "like you mean it."

"Fuck me," she says again, a hint more assurance in her voice, and she can feel his cock begin to leap and twitch inside her, she can feel the way her words are stirring him to desperation, and she goes hot and cold all over at the way she can feel him respond to her like this.  "Fuck me," she says again, fingers digging into his back, and this time it's real, somewhere between a plea and a command, and Marcus can't hold out anymore.

So he does.

"Oh God," Abby exclaims, the air rushing out of her lungs in a long low gasp as Marcus begins to rise and fall on top of her.  His cock fills her up completely, the tip nudging gently inside her at the spot that makes her whole body feel like electric shocks are bursting inside her. "Marcus.  Oh.  _Oh._ Don't stop.  Please don't stop."

Marcus can't even form words, can only groan heavily into her shoulder, but he reaches down to interlace his fingers with hers and she can feel his hand shaking and she knows all the way down to the marrow of her bones that nobody has ever loved him like this.  Everything that is happening to him is happening for the first time, and he can hardly breathe.  She reaches her other hand up to rest against the back of his neck, tangling in his thick dark curls, and murmurs, "Let me look at you." 

His head lifts up, startled, and she cradles his face in both her hands as he slides deeper and deeper inside her.  "I want to see you," she whispers.  "Stay like this.  Stay with me." 

Her hips arch up to meet his, startling a groan out of him, and he's embarrassed suddenly at the nakedness of his pleasure, of his desire for her, and he tugs his gaze away from hers, but she shakes her head and brings him back.  "I want to look at you," she tells him again.  "I don't ever want to stop looking at you."

"Abby -"

"You're so beautiful," she whispers.  "You're so beautiful to me."

"Abby, I," he begins but can't finish.  "You . . ."

"Everything is so _real_ ," she says in wonderment, her finger caressing the soft bristle of his beard, her thumb brushing his lower lip.  "You're so _real_."

"Oh God, Abby," he gasps, feeling her warm wetness pull him in deeper and deeper until finally he's buried inside her up to the hilt, plunging in faster and harder and harder and faster, groaning in dizzy ecstasy while she holds him there so she can watch every sensation play out over his face.

They hold out as long as they can, wanting to draw the moment out as far as possible, but he's overwhelmed and aching for release and he can feel the tidal wave begin to swell inside him, too heavy and powerful to resist any longer.  "Abby, I'm -"

"Yes," she whispers.  "Come inside me, Marcus."  He presses his eyes closed, panting, trying to swallow back the unseemly animal grunts that seem to be the only sound his body wants to make, but her insistent fingers on his cheek bring him back to her.  "Stay with me," she says again. "Look at me, Marcus."

"I'm going to - Abby, I'm - "

"Yes," she breathes, eyes locked on his as he rises and falls, rises and falls, heat pulsing through his entire body.  "Marcus, yes."

"Abby," he groans, and there it is, he can't hold back the raw wild groans anymore because he's hovering on the precipice and beginning to tilt over the cliff, he's about to fall, but he wants Abby to fall with him, so as he plunges into her harder and harder he slips his fingers back down into the silky wetness and traces tight little circles just the way he did before, glowing with satisfaction and pleasure as her eyes open wide and he can feel her rise with him. 

"I'm so close," she breathes hoarsely.  "Right there, Marcus, oh, oh, please . . . right there, don't stop, I'm going to - "

"Abby!"  Her name tumbles out of his lips in a hard, desperate roar as he bursts, over and over and over again, deep inside her.  It goes on forever, wave after wave breaking over him and leaving him spent, nearly lifeless, as he sinks back down to earth.  But she follows only a heartbeat behind him, her climax peaking just as he begins to descend, and the soft fluttering little cries that pour out of her leave him breathless.

When they've finally both shuddered and trembled back into stillness, drawing deep hard breaths back into their lungs as the room stops spinning and the world returns to normal, neither of them can speak for a long time.  Marcus slides softly, gently out of her and rolls onto his back, pulling her close so she can pillow her head on his chest.  She curls up into him, feeling his heartbeat gradually slow and soften, and feels their bodies melt together. 

"It was never like this," she whispers suddenly, startling him.  "In the City of Light.  The way I feel now . . . it wasn't like this."  She leans up on her elbow to look at him, hair a honey-colored silk curtain hanging over her shoulder.  "She made me forget that I loved you," she whispers, and Marcus feels his heart tighten inside his chest.  "It made me feel good, all the things we did - everything felt good - but it wasn't _enough._   It was never enough.  There was this ache inside me, this empty space, and no matter how many times we did - those things we did -" (she blushes again, the old shyness beginning to come back) "it didn't fill that empty space, because the love was gone."

He nods, understanding.  "That's why it felt wrong to me," he whispers.  "When I came back.  When I realized what I'd done.  Before I knew it was you.  I thought, somehow you must know, that that was why you couldn't look at me.  Like I had somehow reduced you to just a body, just a woman I wanted to - when you're so much more to me than that, Abby, you're _everything_ to me, and I -"

She kisses him, stroking his hair back from his forehead, and presses her warm small body tighter against his. 

“Bellamy told me you didn’t want to talk to anyone about it,” he says unexpectedly.  “Not with Clarke or with him or with Raven or with anyone.  That you didn’t want to think about the City of Light at all.  You couldn’t stand to hear anyone even mention it.”  She leans up onto her elbow to look into his eyes.

“That’s true,” she agrees cautiously.  “Why?”

“Which is why Raven never told you about the synaptic filter resets,” he says.  “She wanted to.  But you didn’t ask.  You didn’t want to think about it.”

“The what?”

“I wasn’t sure if you remembered,” he goes on.  “I don’t either – not really – but she told me everything.  Apparently,” he adds dryly, "you were _quite_ a pain in the ass.  ALIE couldn't keep you docile."

"I take that as a compliment."

"I suspected you might."

“I didn’t know that the you inside the City of Light was the you I was with,” he explains.  “I thought the real Abby was somewhere else and the woman with me was just an illusion.  But it all fits together now.”

"I don't remember anything about a – what did you call it?  A synaptic filter reset?”

"Well, you wouldn't," he explains, "because she wiped your memory each time.  But it wasn't just one.  _I_ had one.  You had _hundreds."_  

She stares, and he smiles at her with something shining his eyes that looks like pride.   " _That's_ who you are to me," he tells her.  "That's who you'll always be to me.  The woman who loves her daughter so much that she nearly broke the City of Light trying over and over to escape and get back to her.  You were stronger than all of us.  Because deep inside there was a part of you that always remembered."

And then suddenly, she _does_ remember.

A cascade of memories flicker through her mind - a cool sunny afternoon, a vanilla latte, a red coat, a sparkling gray-blue harbor, the sudden startling flash of Marcus Kane's mouth on hers the day they said goodbye in Arkadia, the cold wave of anger that sent her storming across the plaza to where a serene Thelonious Jaha stood watching her.  And then the whole world had blinked out of existence for a moment.  That must be how it happened.  It must have happened hundreds of times. 

“That’s why they wanted you there with me,” she says, the truth suddenly crystal clear before her.  “That's why ALIE did everything she did."

He nods, a little distantly, as though holding some emotion at bay.  “Yes,” he agrees.  “She brought me there to keep you distracted.”  There’s a strange dull tone in his voice, and she wonders how long it will take before he truly understands, how many times she will have to say it before he trusts that this is real.

"It was more than that," she murmurs.  "ALIE brought you to me so I would stop fighting.  Because _you_ were the thing I was fighting for." 

He looks up at her, eyes wide and startled and shining with emotion.  She presses her lips softly against his forehead.  "You were the thing I was fighting for," she tells him again, and this time she thinks maybe – just maybe – he believes it.  "I was trying to find my way home to you."


End file.
